When I was still suckling you
for as long as I did
I read old stories on my phone
leaning your solid little body back
your downy head in my elbow
while I held the device above your head.
The phone’s glow blazed
into my eyes as I scrolled
through stories of captive animals.
I read of a circus elephant dropped from a crane
to break her back
after she trampled an abusive keeper
of an adolescent laboratory bonobo who persisted
in manually reopening his anal fissure
after years-long rape
by the father he was imprisoned with
and I returned again and again
to Laika’s story and the words
of one of the scientists who took her home
to play with his children
before she was sent to her death
in the little Sputnik 2.
I wanted to do something nice for her
he wrote of the little dog they carefully prepared
for voyage into space
knowing she would not return.
She had so little time to live.
I feared
every day
that you would drink in the fear
and anger that coursed through my body
while your feeding wrung out the milk
that surged alongside my compulsive
thumbing into despair.
Because it was during my pregnancy
your birth
and your infancy that I realized
my chimerical state
that the body I inhabited could produce
what others needed from it
all while I tried to live.
I won’t tell of when
I gave my body to the uprising
because it wasn’t meant to matter
then.
I was meant
then
to lift up the machinery
of intentional and drastic dismantlement.
In the force of change
my body was good.
It had heft enough
to displace the harm and terror
that was pervading us all.
It moved
was real.
In life and in death it could affirm
equally.
My body has changed so much
and with each change it can
never return to what it was before.
I know that bodily changes
are not just additive
but often transformative.
It’s because of this that I’m not sure
we can ever retain an essence
except in the eyes of others.
I was once your mother
and I’m sorry to you
my love
that because you are my child
I will always remain as such to you.