lifeline

wedged in the top branches, rain still sighing to earth as a dissolute sky dissolves, a mozambican woman turns mother, her water breaking loose to pool with the flood licking the trunk below, a country-sized puddle calls forth the child whose name, the mother vowed, would not be drowned, no matter how high she had to climb. my mother’s water washed her bare yellow bathroom tile many years ago, a diluvial warning of my struggle to arrive. we fought to get me out, and have been tugging at each other ever since, tethered by a cord that simply thickens when it’s cut. we descended then, thirsting, churning, not into the waters that hound the mozambican mother, baying her and her baby in the tree, but into that enduring ocean in which — as mother, daughter, or both — a woman’s only choices are drink or swim.