Miranda Sun (19)
Bearing
First Place Winner of the Hips Contest
I did not come through my mother’s hips;
I was sliced out of her stomach
like a fruit growing inside a tree instead of out
or a tumor growing exactly where it wanted
to be. Some mutated apple, flesh red and pulpy
and warm from the dark trunk. I once traced
my peach-soft fingers across the scar, grafted
onto the smooth oak of my mother’s stomach,
but at six, I did not truly know
what wound it must have been.
I was born premature—was removed
premature; but we all are. You see, human babies—
their heads are too big to continue inside,
so they are born early, skulls soft, kicking
their feet at air that is still too heavy.
In the wild a horse leaves for herself;
no attendants, no medicine, nothing
but the nicker of wind and switchgrass
flattened by a new body, sliding wet
in a tangle of legs to the earth
from her horse hips. The foal is up
in a sweat-soaked hour or two,
wobbling on twiggy limbs, must
because death waits in the wings
of a vulture, and above
the most important part are shoulders,
how much meat they are willing to settle for.
But on the ground it is hips. Up from the ground
we stagger ape-like on the ground over the
ground where we will eventually lay, turn wild turn
feral turn fetal, once our bones no longer
support our self-serving bid to run.
These parentheses: all of humanity is a line
of hips scrambling up and bearing
further hips: sets of bones set parallel
to one another: white gates to walk through.
Miranda Sun is nineteen years old. An alumna of the NYS Summer Young Writers Institute and the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, her work has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and published in TRACK//FOUR, The Claremont Review, Sobotka, YARN, and more. She loves aquariums and bubble tea. Find her on Twitter @heregoesthesun.
Bearing
First Place Winner of the Hips Contest
I did not come through my mother’s hips;
I was sliced out of her stomach
like a fruit growing inside a tree instead of out
or a tumor growing exactly where it wanted
to be. Some mutated apple, flesh red and pulpy
and warm from the dark trunk. I once traced
my peach-soft fingers across the scar, grafted
onto the smooth oak of my mother’s stomach,
but at six, I did not truly know
what wound it must have been.
I was born premature—was removed
premature; but we all are. You see, human babies—
their heads are too big to continue inside,
so they are born early, skulls soft, kicking
their feet at air that is still too heavy.
In the wild a horse leaves for herself;
no attendants, no medicine, nothing
but the nicker of wind and switchgrass
flattened by a new body, sliding wet
in a tangle of legs to the earth
from her horse hips. The foal is up
in a sweat-soaked hour or two,
wobbling on twiggy limbs, must
because death waits in the wings
of a vulture, and above
the most important part are shoulders,
how much meat they are willing to settle for.
But on the ground it is hips. Up from the ground
we stagger ape-like on the ground over the
ground where we will eventually lay, turn wild turn
feral turn fetal, once our bones no longer
support our self-serving bid to run.
These parentheses: all of humanity is a line
of hips scrambling up and bearing
further hips: sets of bones set parallel
to one another: white gates to walk through.
Miranda Sun is nineteen years old. An alumna of the NYS Summer Young Writers Institute and the Kenyon Review Young Writers Workshop, her work has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards and published in TRACK//FOUR, The Claremont Review, Sobotka, YARN, and more. She loves aquariums and bubble tea. Find her on Twitter @heregoesthesun.