Hatchling
Dearest, I wonder why
In English the body is both dead
and alive.
—Aria Aber
i.
My first memories of you
are memories of me
ii.
Clutching a loaf of bread outside a hospital house of glass.
I flung crust upon the lake, helped ducks break its shatterproof glass.
You remained, nested, inside a box I could not grasp.
A tiny baby boy embraced by sterile plexiglass.
Did I ever touch you? Hold you? Play with your short-lived toes?
And how did I see you before you looked through eyes of glass?
Before they bathed you in our courtyard? Before I spied from concrete stairs?
Before the sun blazed through your skin as if it were translucent glass?
My first corpse, my brother—a speckled egg with broken shell
in parts purple, pink and blue, thanks to piercing guns of glass.
For forty weeks, our mom sustained your errant beating heart.
Then fifty days, you chewed the world through puppet jaws of glass.
My baby, at fifty days, grew nails bamboo fast and sharp.
Unwilling to get scratched, I ground my fear with files of glass.
But this was Pakistan, where الله ruled no part of you be cut.
And this was 1988, years before nails met tempered glass.
Uncle, father, grandfather, imam—performed غسل first
then shrouded you in کفن, three layers, white as milk glass.
They scented you with camphor to keep insects at bay
then carried you away from home, house, half-empty glass.
iii.
I ran back upstairs to play after I was done watching flew
from fledgling earthen grave
we had five visas repurposed
your overseas cure ensured my unborn baby’s heart
beat unlike yours
every American doctor heeding its electric echoes
is surprised that you died I shower the facts upon them
this was Pakistan this was 1988
I do not tell them your grave names only
your father who
blessed you buried you
left
his wife to mourn
unseen
unknown
how I pleased myself in guessing
how I asked if you were dead
son-shaped craters in place of her eyes
how I found
our mother
Atia Sattar is a Pakistani-American poet whose writing has been supported by the Ucross Foundation, PEN America, Anaphora Arts, and the Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow. A finalist for the Beullah Rose Poetry Prize and a nominee for the Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, Atia’s poems appear or are forthcoming in Smartish Pace, Poetry Northwest, the minnesota review, and The Shore, among others. She is the editor of How to Decolonize the Feminist and Queer Studies Classroom (np: press, 2026). She teaches at the University of Southern California.
