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Water Birth

By JoAnn Balingit

There’s no usurping her pain
now the baby’s head is crowning
mom mom mom mom mom

no panting I say
take deep breaths through your nose
everyone in the room

takes deep breaths through their nose
except perhaps Matthew who is crying
face pale and wet in her hands

I don’t know which weighs more
in the scale of the body
mother or grandmother

and just like that my daughter pushes
a person into a bathtub
of city of Newark water

the invisible birth waters
rain from our past
already bewater our future

call the world what it is
its magic plain to see
I can’t do this she wails having done it

the long wet creature warbles once
and all of us wail
our pre-discovered sounds

make a back-up I think
behind closed eyes but the future
is backed up inside our bodies

the baby I see already calls
the origin dreams
back from sea

 


 

 

Listen as JoAnn Balingit reads Water Birth.

Added: Tuesday, June 24, 2025  /  Used with permission.
JoAnn Balingit

JoAnn Balingit is a poet, essayist and arts education advocate who grew up in Florida and lives in northern Delaware. She has two chapbooks and a full-length book of poems, Words for House Story (WordTech 2013). JoAnn spent January to May 2024 in the Philippines on a Fulbright fellowship researching Kapampángan culture, its endangered language and her paternal roots for a memoir in progress. Her writing appears in Asian American Literary Review, Atticus Review, The Common, The Nation, Poetry, The Rumpus and elsewhere. She believes in the sacred communal power of poems and stories, and collaborates with Delaware Division of the Arts to teach poetry and creative writing to seniors and high school students. She served as Delaware’s poet laureate from 2008 to 2015.

Image Description: JoAnn Balingit, a Kapampángan German American woman with olive skin and black hair, smiles into the camera. She's sitting outside on a sunny day with blue ocean, sky, palm fronds and monstera plants behind her. She’s wearing large round glasses, a red sleeveless dress and dangly earrings.  

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