The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Surfacing by Emily Tuszynska

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Floodplain

All morning in mid-labor
not ready for the hospital

walking the floodplain
the earth still soft
waters receded
tulip poplars
knotted sycamores
clumps of grass
ghosted with silt
the trees leaned downstream
from many floods
I clung to them
my sisters I thought if I thought at all
somehow the term did not seem wrong
the ground was washed bare
fibrous roots exposed
slack water
dusty with pollen
we walked and rested and walked again
bowing
then kneeling
to each contraction as it came
some bright bit of blue
caught on the far bank
without panic
I felt each crest carry me farther
away from you
away from familiar ground
in the spaces between
your hands
lightly—
the air on my face—
maybe I was the trees
their massive trunks shifting
as wind poured
through high branches
perhaps I was the riverbed
or the light as it pulsed between moving leaves
from all about us
a wordless insistence
deep in my interior
the forest the water rising

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