Sentimental Evening
The pewter moon’s eyebrowed guise
circles a picture of my son. A windex tear
falls to my son’s cheek, and I know
we will never fully know one another.
Message after message asking:
How is the breast feeding going?
Let me tell you: Not great. Not great at all.
Everywhere advice to make the milk come:
plums, fenugreek, blessed thistle.
This morning each stream of water falling
from my showerhead was a knife ready
to gut me. The pewter moon’s smile
wants to eat me whole. Online strangers
tell me to love my postpartum body.
They say: You are tiger, you are zebra.
I am desperate to return to the numb feeling
of the surgical theater, the sound
of the doctor mispronouncing my full name.
In the mail a medical bill worth more
than a pickup truck arrives. It arrives before
the state gives my son a social security number,
a birth certificate, a sign of arrival.
Even at my most animal I am the price
of my bearded belly, the price of my crying
breasts, the price of being split,
excavated, vacuumed, and stapled shut.