In her essay ‘The Ga(s)p’, M. NourbeSe Philip sketches a respirational poetics that embeds the precarity of African American breath in a natal scene of conspiration. In a gesture of ‘radical hospitality’, every mother breathes for the unborn baby. Her book Zong!, consisting of words torn from a legal document about a massacre on a slave ship, is described as a ‘series of ga(s)ps for air with syllabic sounds attached or overlaid’. In the moment when Philip’s reflections turn to syllables, a striking resonance with Charles Olson’s poetics of breathing from the 1950s can be observed. Both Olson and Philip develop their thoughts on breath and syllables around the act of taking over word-material from a problematic ‘mother-text’. The essay investigates the tensions between the ethical act of ‘breathing with’ as Philip outlines it and the more common sense of ‘conspiration’ (conspiring, conspiracy).