about the hair, how it falls out, webs
between your fingers and streams
in the shower and clumps on your pillow
and on the floor and in the hands of one
who still loves you. But you don’t believe them.
They’ve lied before. And they don’t tell you
about the split, how you can fit
a fist between your left and right sides.
You can work to make it narrower, they say,
build back the muscles in your abdomen
and pelvic floor. It just takes time.
You can get it all back, they say, but you know
that is not the point. And you knew you’d be tired,
that the body can only keep up for so long.
They warned you days would be long but years
would fly and again, they were wrong,
because everything is flying and the rain
is coming down the way July had never known it.
And you think, my body was an ark once.
And you ask, would it still float? And in days,
your son will have breahted air as long as water.
And maybe Noah was a woman too.
They never told you this. But the rain
is coming and you are holding
a wad of your own hair in one hand
as your son’s head rests along the other.
And you think, they never told you
any of this. How your hands
would never keep up.

Upcoming events featuring Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach:

November 21st 6:30 @ Haverford College Lutnick Library Moderating “From Across the Waters: Voices for Immigration” with Olga Livshin
Featuring Poets: Rosebud Ben-Oni, Ananda Lima, and paulA neves

Thursday, November 21, 2019, Lutnick Library, 6:30 PM, November 24th 5PM @ Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry with Ananda Lima, Artress Bethany White, and KC Trommer

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach (www.juliakolchinskydasbach.com) emigrated from Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She is the author of The Many Names for Mother, winner the Wick Poetry Prize (Kent State University Press, 2019) and The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014). Her second collections, Don’t Touch the Bones, won the 2019 Idaho Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Lost Horse Press in March 2020. 40 WEEKS, written while pregnant with her now 4-month-old daughter, is forthcoming from YesYes Books in 2021. Her poems appear in POETRY, American Poetry Review, and The Nation, among others. Julia is the editor of Construction Magazine. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is completing her Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Philly with her two children, two cats, one dog, and one husband.