Your Mouth a Tether by DC Restaino

You latch on hard, quick, for your nightly feeding.

P tries to distract me while he brushes his teeth. Pokes fun at my dramatics. “Finally putting that theatre degree to use,” he says as he creases the rags used to mop up my leaking body. I twitch on my back in the center of our bed, focus on a distant point.

In the dim corner of the bedroom, a moth gets snared in a web. Fidgets its wings until silver dust puffs from its body. Wiggles more. The web spirals, but has a center. That center is home to a spider. My mother would mark its presence as an omen heralding a slow death.

P asks if we could fuck with that boyish grin of his. It usually works for me, but I say, “Everything still hurts.” He shifts closer, gentle, and asks where, asks if I need the cooling pads again. I turn on my side toward him, twist my hips so my distended gut is tucked away. Mirror the location of my pain on his body like he’s a victim doll from an episode of Law & Order: SVU.

You cry whether I acknowledge you or not. You cry whether I hold you or not. You cry whether I sing to you or not. You cry whether I play a hard staccato percussion line or croon a lament. You cry later that night when I arrange you in your crib, bend over you, darken your world, hum of sold-off youth under my breath.

In the corner of the room, the spider plays with the moth before wrapping it, cinching its dull-grey wings to its body. The moth was once a caterpillar before twisting itself into a pupa. Does it think this is the same? Another process of transformation? Does the moth accept this as the next stage of its life?

My mother calls before the next night’s feeding; it’s morning where she is on the other side of the world. P is still at work. The spider remains unmentioned in its web; I’m spent, and the absence of me strips down my voice. “I told you to sanhujori,” my mother says, words free of tension like a dropped stitch that I get tangled in. “You’re body is too open. You must close yourself.” Months ago, I refused her suggestion of convalescing in isolation after giving birth. Told her I didn’t want to be cared for by strangers giving me hot, soft foods and leading me in exercises to reshape my body and watching my child while I recovered. My friends had slipped into motherhood seamlessly; I thought I could do the same.

Morning. Afternoon. Night, spreading its legs open for dawn. You keep latching on.

P doesn’t get frustrated with me. He gets frustrated at the growing pile of my soiled clothes, the sheets that haven’t been changed in the week since we returned from the hospital, the smell in the crust of my body, the fact I cocoon myself in bed all hours of the day. He is unravelling in front of me, but how do I tell him about this? Of having excavated my body, turned myself inside out and left everything for someone else? Of your silence before your first cry that seemed to extend for days, weeks, months, and I thought I had failed? Of the dread that accompanied your wail after the cord tying us together was?

My right nipple is now a raw scab, but you refuse the left. Your mouth burns me, but you don’t care. I am always thirsty while you feed as if you are also taking what is mine. My body surrenders itself to someone else now, even when I don’t mean it to, and I can’t seem to remember how I used to keep such large parts of me for myself.

I wake up the the second—third? fifth?—Sunday home and I start crying. When I can’t stop, P asks if he should call the doctor. Asks if he can rub the cement from my feet. Asks if I want a double from Five Guys, tries to crack that old joke of his about getting stuffed by five guys. He is reaching, reaching, reaching.

The web sags in the center where the spider, bloated and satiated, rests. The moth remains strangled, a dry husk the spider can’t cast off.

That night, I stand over you again, naked. I catastrophise your future, unspool it between us like yarn and read its knots. How I will always see you as the body I forced into existence, and not the thirteen, twenty-five, fifty-seven-year-old you will become. How you will strip me down by my mistakes you uncover, sharpen your teeth on the crest of my hip, use my hair as floss and pluck the bones from my fingers for toothpicks. How this body will still be yours. You cry out when I laugh over your crib, tuck the blankets around your still-soft body.

In the morning, P finally notices the web in the corner. Frowning, he moves closer to it with his hand outstretched—I’ve forgotten how sure his hands can be—and provides a straight path for the spider from the web to the window. He frees it into the world and then sweeps everything else away—the dust gathered like Spanish moss, the clutch of the spun threads, the moth tucked away in its last shell. He lets it all go, makes it seem so simple. When he turns around, I slink out of bed and slap him, then kiss him hard. P looks confused but smiles. I leave him to shower; after, P and I start on the laundry while you nap nearby, outgrowing us.

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DC RESTAINO — DC is a writer and editor living in London. His work has appeared online and in print at Michigan Quarterly Review, Funicular Magazine, Horizon Magazine, Outcrop Poetry, Thread Magazine, and elsewhere. He is a current PhD candidate at King’s College London.

Art by RAVI AARVIN —  Ravi (he/they) is a queer multidisciplinary writer, artist, and curator from Karachi, Pakistan. They work largely with surrealism and archival experimentation. He has been longlisted for the 2026 DISQUIET Literary Prize in Poetry, and his work has appeared, or is forthcoming in Usawa Literary Review, Kitab Ghar, Writing Women, The Blue Orange Zine, Misery Meals, Naming the Lines in Our Palms After Rivers anthology, and elsewhere. Their work has also been exhibited in Karachi, Kathmandu, and Chiang Mai. He is the Art Editor at Lihaaf Zine, a Desi Dyke zine/archive.