We’re in a place where words don’t work.
The painters tarp the windows
and the air inside the house goes gauzy.
The crying baby shakes the house. The baby’s face red and wild
he’s sweating in the swaddle. His eyes are sealed. The baby has no mother
yet. The air inside the house rubbed raw.
The painters circle the house in hazmat suits,
chipping flakes of blue lead paint into the yard. We’re haloed by harm.
•
When the baby finally sleeps the house seals itself like an envelope.
The mother scours the kitchen for something sweet,
cracking a sugar-crusted muffin against her teeth. Asleep
the baby is a solid mass of muslin, spittle, milk. Where does the baby go
in sleep? Does he dream himself
a better mother? Does another woman hold him
down the long cool hallway of his dream life?
•
A mother is a body. The mother is a body for the baby. She leaks
and spurts. Her parts are unreliable and worn. The mother’s body
has no private places.
In bed the mother tries to remember how it felt when the baby swam inside her.
She lies on her back and feels the soft space in her belly,
the two finger gap in abdominal wall where her body split
so he could grow. He has his own skin now, lungs that billow and contract
like paired fluttering miracles.
•
The mother loves the baby
and also she can’t finish a sentence. Her mind reaches the frayed end of a thought
and the verb falls out of reach.
Friends when they visit seem to travel in
from a foreign country of sleep.
•
The baby cries when the mother leaves the room. Which must mean that she exists,
if she can be missed.
•
Now she’s sobbing in the produce section, picking through a box of bell peppers,
their skins gone loose and soft. Now it’s morning,
the daytime baby cooing in his bassinet. She touches her nose
to his pursed damp lips and inhales.
•
The mother wakes in the night. The dark is a belly. She tosses inside it.
Headlights flash through the window. Dark again then.
The baked bread smell of sleeping baby in the mother’s room. When she wakes
the sheets are soaked, the sugar of spilled milk
crystallized against the pillowcase. The room is dark. The baby’s breathing
somewhere out of reach.