IN THE DELIVERY ROOM, AFTER HOURS OF HARD LABOR

When I was too tired to push any longer:  the midwife

grabbed my hand and forced me to reach between

my legs to feel the hardboiled skull blooming there.

When the bones and flesh of two people are forced

to pass by each other like tetonic plates on a transform

fault, one must yield to the other and so my body molded

hers as she passed, imprint as temporary as a finger

pressed into rising dough. She twisted her way free

even as I clenched to hold her back, and after the long,

slow burn of passage, I asked the lights to be turned

down low that I could witness the first wick of flame,

this smoldering coal roaring to life, hungry for mine.

Rose Postma's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Plainsongs, Atlanta Review, Tar River Poetry Journal, and Weber: the Contemporary West, among others.