Where We Come From
by Gabriella Brand
Use any milk, Holstein heavy, scummy white, or teat-bloated mother’s milk, thin and sudsy as dishwater, with a bluish hue like an old wound. Heat it up.
Before giving birth, my veins bulged, turning breasts into highways, thoroughfares, the Milky Way.
Add lemon juice to the milk. Watch the curds float like nubby islands in the river of whey. The enamel pot will smell like a nursery.
Before giving birth, my own navel flattened wide across my swollen belly, like a small eye pressed up against a windowpane.
Drain the clumps slowly in cheesecloth. And wait. Let it drip.
Nothing is born dry. Everything is wet, at first.
I remember kissing you, back then, before the babies came.
Press the curds into a sphere, a hand, a message, a name. Paneer, queso blanco, farmer’s cheese, wagashi.
Call it what you will.
Something always comes from something else. Cheese from milk.
Us from others. Others from us.
Gabriella Brand's short stories and poetry appear in such publications as New Lit Salon, Critical Art, and Résonance. Her travel writing can be found in The Globe and Mail and The Christian Science Monitor. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and serves as the Poet Laureate of her small Connecticut town.
