1. parramatta
               childbirth is as bloody as war & I am

                      due to give birth soon. I too am being reborn

as a mother, an indian mother, an australian mother.

   there are weights attached to me that drag my limbs under.

in every place I’ve been is every other place I’ve been.

           we immigrants live out of boxes

                   in our heads even after

     we’ve unpacked the ones in our garages. I was born

in a hospital south of murtala mohammed airport in lagos, but I find

traces of lagos in parramatta, where I teach when I’m

            eight months pregnant. there are many of us here,

      sudanese, indian, nigerian, pakistani, lebanese, iranian, malaysian,

  sri lankan, filipino. my students come from homes where the parents watch

                    english movies with tamil subtitles & the children

     watch tamil movies with english subtitles. within the older boys boils

          a khoon-red rage

             emasculated

      by otherness, by lessness, by being labelled

                       for every step they take, every word they speak,

    the intonations of those words, their gestures, allowed none

        of the invisible liberties

white boys enjoy. within the girls & the women is a silt-dark

            hunger to be, to be allowed to be, untouched & uncontained,

 spoken & heard,

                heard, heard, heard.

   charred dust & ants in the cracks

of our mouths. our blackness, our brownness, washed

up on the sugar-white shores of a country where

                       the hospitals aren’t clogged like

         sclerotic arteries, their tiles slick with piss & vomit,

             where the people aren’t bled like cows

for sacrifice. we are seeking shelter. shelter is seeking us.

our organs grow outside of us, pumping, pulsing, vulnerable

        to the knives of the questions we are asked:

              where do you come from? when will you go back?

  some of us have no choice but to go back. no choice but to stay.

                                                  our brothers, our sisters

in detention centres & those of us outside of them with survivors’ guilt

  eating away at us like acid. we are journalists, doctors, labourers.

we are farmers whose villages burned, whose crops succumbed to

  warfare & drought. we are artists who bleed onto canvases

          & lovers who flee beheadings because our bodies happen to be

the same sex. we push & push, birthing a tomorrow

   that never seems to arrive. an unending, wracking labour.

 when I think about giving birth I consider blacktown hospital

     because I live there, but am advised by my obstetrician

  to opt for norwest instead. I am upper-middle-class,

       with private health insurance. I can afford it,

despite the colour of my skin, despite having been born

            across the seas myself, in a hospital where my mother lay

    sick & haemorrhaging on an unwashed bed

                         & nearly did not survive me.

    now, my mother puts betel leaves in my mouth

for luck. my child squirms within my belly. across

             parramatta the train track stretches,

                    a dark vein, needle-pricked, inflamed.

    there are nerves that spark between the bones of this

place, its vertebrae of concrete & eyes of glass,

            the shops the smoke-filled lungs of its body

& the streets its grey-white ribs creaking under the weight

they bear. the heavy quietude of the train station at sunrise

                  is an unborn child, a conglomeration

  of all our silenced words, our terrors, our hopes. I fall asleep

      to the rhythmic clacking of that silence, my hand curled

atop my swollen abdomen.

                         my child, I decide, my child will speak.
translations

khoon: blood