Other women don’t tell you
it will always be your fault:
his nose running
after that first dip
in the Atlantic,
his bruised elbow
and scraped knee,
his hair, too long,
always in his face
and his face, too much
or too little of yours,
his hard hands
slapping the animals,
unclear, misshapen
words, loud and large enough
to fill any public space
with unintelligible language,
and then that birthmark,
high up on his glute,
that one’s especially
your fault, from when
you were so scared
you grabbed
onto your belly—fear
seeps through the fingertips,
your mother said, down
into thick, pregnant flesh,
down through fluid
and layers of your body
protecting his, down
onto unknowing skin—
marking him afraid,
the history he comes from,
in perpetual, dark bloom
Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine as a Jewish refugee when she was six years old. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania, where her research focuses on contemporary American poetry about the Holocaust. Julia’s poetry collection The Many Names for Mother won the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and is forthcoming from Kent State University Press in the fall of 2019. She is also the author of The Bear Who Ate the Stars (Split Lip Press, 2014) and her recent poems appear in Best New Poets, American Poetry Review, and Nashville Review, among others. Julia is the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine and when not busy chasing her toddler around the playgrounds of Philadelphia, she writes a blog about motherhood: other women don’t tell you.