Flashback to that time in prenatal yoga. The first time you were pregnant and had no other job, maternally anyway, than growing that tiny human and channeling all your energy into it. When you could go to a class once a week by yourself, surrounded by other expectant mothers. Where you could bask in the beauty of rounded bellies, orbs in profile as your fingertips pointed forward. The potential energy of abdomens and archetypes. Muscles taut and ready to tense, to push a new soul earthward. And while intuition and multigenerational muscle memory take hold in the throes of labor,

it is you

who fire the muscles

who isolate the exact ones at the precise time

who activate the strength within

and gasp the first lung-filling breath.