gooseberry toes

Enough has been written about mothering, but each adventure is new. Each is our own. What surprises me: everything and nothing. It all overrides my surprise function and goes deep into some other part of me, where all this is somehow known. Atavistic. The shape of her ear, like complicated fruit, against her skull. Her hunger. Her gooseberry toes. A flesh that came from me. I know her because she is me. (My mother once said this to me and I thought how egotistical and wrong she was. Now I see.)

nursing

she flings herself from the breast
arms raised in surprise—or triumph—she struggles to found her mouth
arms jerking

second life

once translucent, candy-stripped
funnel of nourishment made more declarative than I’d thought possible

now—only ten days since—
blackened and fossilized
turned a million years old
a remnant of a previous age
Pleistocene era, man-apes
The first human foliage blooms on her vine, then shrivels and falls

Now she is one of us—Second Life, tin cans, plastic bottles,
her hunger soon will turn to horoscope-gazing

where is the nursery?

The room down the hall where you take the crying one and they return her two hours later wrapped up like a burrito slit-eyed and dreaming in a little longshoreman’s cap

No nursery here.
Only jumble-tiled bathroom
Stiff-necked
The cool green room chugging air
And a blank page changing table
Burning chartreuse walls

desert

A tiny thing crawling through the desert, parched, glimpsing an oasis. The force of her mouth on the breast like a vacuum hose on those shrink wrap storage containers that pull all the air out of your winter sweaters until they are balls of tired fleece. Breasts of tired fleece. Inflatable, though. Every few hours rising above the horizon, and her tired, despairing gaze, lifted from the hot sand fixates on them and she calls her brazen, curdling life-and-death wail.

I pull her to the breast and she begins to drink. Everything else fades. It is okay, I tell her. And it is.

invisible system

an invisible system
the climber and the peak
forager and the land
freezing homeless and a warm subway grate
starving man in the mythical desert