Certificate of Live Birth

You arrive on a Friday, with hail & vast
moving grey above small window
of white light, as a wound
which might be a passing through
of particulate ultra violet waiting
to arrive in sight, our adjectival
see. will it be violent, our photographic
ring around the light?

we inviolate what we can’t see,
revelate its arrival with our question:
boy or girl?

please, let the unseen speak in me.
there are stellar nurseries we cannot grimace.
i am a certificate of a bright somewhere.
you are a poem passing through
the membranes i have moved, mountainous you,
head up-of the interrogative blue

Copyright © 2020 by Jasmine Reid. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 9, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“‘Certificate of Live Birth’ articulates the self as, itself, proof of birth, a self-labor moving its reader beyond such certification as a document imposed at birth and based in inadequate seeing into one that, rather, emerges from the mouth of the (a)live(ness) birthed. Here, as everywhere, gender emerges from the unseen inner-space of a life. Moving us from the seen to the unseen, this poem makes alive the record, lets speak and delivers, again, the life, alive.”
—Jasmine Reid

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