The root of free,

as in not in bondage
may mean love, but hurtling

down I-94, my mind spins in freefall.
All day, no time passes. Sky stays white

as smoke and I remember black ice,
shattered ribs. I almost don’t believe

humans continue
hurling our soft bodies forward.

Still, on these Wisconsin hills
the gravest hazards lurk in my head:

if I alone edge past a ledge
who would notice? My daughter

glances up from her phone,
says, this world of winter looks fake.

White crystals feather every line
every needle of pine, what’s real

too wondrous to fathom. Fiery eyes
gleam through silvered lids, pink hair

as her head tips onto my shoulder.
A sedge of cranes trumpets

over the freeway, hundreds upon hundreds,
still north, so late. Soaring, unworried.

I roll down my window to listen.

*

Intima

All year I hear in my vessels
susurrations like summer dusk.

But now as dawn seeps into day
I can’t parse threads of song—

breath upon breath, moth wings
against wings, shushing edges

of leaves— or sound the depth
of silence holding us, or fathom

how close we are to everything
dying.

*

Hope Is a Discipline

      Hope is a discipline, an ongoing commitment to action.
      On a daily basis, I decide to begin anew. —Mariame Kaba

While crows perch on sunflowers.
      As we slide seeded loaves onto hearth bricks.
When my midwife proclaims me complete.
      Before my neonate son’s lungs stop.
As we plant his placenta under a cedar sapling.
      While my daughter anchors me in her world.
Until biopsy results blare from my phone.
      When we see another phone-video of another killing.
Before wildfire reaches my friend’s mountain town.
      Beyond space my excised organs open.
After a third scan, a fourth infusion.
      When a neighbor brings jasmine tea and honey.
Meanwhile, the woodcock’s sky dance.
      Beyond the twilit sky, dark moon.
Between our hands, heat.
      While we reach. While we hold.
While we face forward.

*

Lailah Shima is a death doula who writes and walks among the lakes of Madison, Wisconsin. Her work has appeared in CALYX, Terrain, and Anti-Heroin Chic, as well as in The Path to Kindness: Poems of Connection and Joy (ed. Jam es Crews). She is an MFA candidate at Pacific University.