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# The Bike Ride; On the Night You Were Born; New Mother
- URL: https://www.fsm.ink/the-bike-ride-on-the-night-you-were-born-new-mother/
- Published: 2022-11-11T23:23:32.000Z
- Updated: 2026-06-03T18:48:56.000Z
- Author: Staff
- Tags: Poetry, #Import 2026-08-03 09:59

by Tara DaPra

## The Bike Ride

On a warm fall afternoon, the man ahead  
of her in traffic rides an old motorcycle. He wears  
a t-shirt, faded jeans, sunglasses, no helmet.  
There’s nothing special about this bike, this  
man: mid-forties, too skinny, cheap haircut. He is not  
the image of sex-on-wheels a younger version  
of this woman might have lusted after. Yet this woman, starting to feel the weight of her age and her situation, wants nothing more than to take the key from its ignition, leave her car at the stoplight, climb on the back  
of this man’s motorcycle, and ride. She doesn’t wonder  
if her pregnant belly will permit her arms  
to wrap around his waist, whether the bike’s vibration will upset the baby tumbling inside her or soothe it.  
As she opens the car door, engine still idling, and steps onto the road, she thinks only of the breeze on her skin and a boy she once loved, the time she burned her calf  
on his tail pipe, the stiff red skin as it healed,  
the wading pool on his balcony where they soaked  
their feet on hot summer nights, and the feeling  
that her life had once been brand new.

---

## On the Night You Were Born

On the night you were born  
the nurse pricked my finger and drew blood,  
my sugar numbers low. I drank juice and  
asked for broth. A tube was threaded  
into my hand, liquids stinging, and I was waiting, waiting for the contractions to begin,  
to feel what I should have been feeling.  
Your father sat on the couch and read his Kindle, still not sure when his role would begin,  
not knowing that it already had.

On the night you were born, I still wasn’t ready to be your mother.

I hadn’t yet pictured your face, your presence. I was pregnant and working and keeping two doctors’ visits each week  
and grading papers and soaking in the bath  
and writing down every bite I ate. I was being kicked

and kicked, enduring a shoulder or a head,  
bulging, bursting at my skin. The doctor flipped  
you right side down and then I was holding you in  
just one more week and one more week, until my semester  
ended and your lungs were ready and I could think about what came next.

On the night you were born, the waves finally came, and the aching tears, the blurry vision and the liquids back up my throat.

On the night you were born, relief from the pain came through a thread into my spine. Drips from the epidural relaxed my tense, tired muscles, my tense, tired mind and I dozed a final few hours. My legs stayed numb except for an itch, an unreachable tickle. Then the nurse reached her arm inside, toward you, and declared it time. The doctor shook my hand and taught me how to push, not with my stomach but lower, and my body knew what to do.

Your heart rate dropped and I breathed through an oxygen mask and the blood pressure cuff beeped and the doctor made a cut and I pushed and pushed and tore and pushed.

On the night you were born your father put down  
his Kindle and watched what I could not see  
and spoke the right words. He held my hand.  
The lights were dim. The Beatles cooed. I breathed  
into the mask. The cuff squeezed my arm. Four pushes, eight second counts. And then you arrived, tiny, smeared with black goo, crying, gasping, face wrinkled and clenched and I didn’t recognize you.

On the night you were born

you were a stranger.

---

## New Mother

How can a new mother write poetry with her mind clear of questions? Tiny, day-old fingers, spread wide across her breast, urging her to let down milk. What can a poem do

in the face of such perfection?

How can music be written against  
the hum of nursing, milk-drunk sleep, unable to return the sleeping babe  
to its crib? Instead, they fall asleep, cradled together, the child’s DNA manifest  
in the mother’s brain, the mother’s DHA  
in the baby’s milk. So it’s not forgetfulness, or absence of thought, but peace, a quiet she’s longed for but never possessed.

And the stillness is punctured only with moments of new anger, confirmation of her own wanting days, and the knowing that she must be another kind of mother.