Issue 003 – Breech birth

Ariadna Maksin

breech birth

how many ribs look how many ribs
how much hunger how much
spit saturated filling smaller shoes
mocking rain down my throat how it fills this earth
spit soaked how we lip to lip and i’ve no more

excuses. this newborn and naked
pride. after, i see someone turn
egg yolk into syrup and think that
was once a duck, or its child, think
how only in death we remember
to love what was not. how
every day someone is reborn watching
the sky swallow itself, the sun’s yolk-iris
peeling around a gutted blue, tongue
a rice paddy a baby pulled out by the legs
and beating and beating and
speaking in synapse, first, last breaths
morse-coded. a life glassing over,
a footstep thawing.

Ariadna (Arina) Maksin is a poet and neurobiology researcher. She is the founding editor of Stemlit, a literary journal at the intersection of creative writing and science. An alumna of the Iowa Young Writers Studio and three-time Scholastic Art and Writing Awards Gold Key awardee, her work is published or forthcoming in Scapegoat Review, Garden Wall Magazine, and Eunoia Review. She received a 2026 Laidlaw Scholarship for her research on opioid addiction. She splits her life between the West and East Coast, and her time dissecting either diction or brains.