Doctors pull a buoyant body from me
and say: Nurse! I drape my son across
my plastic taped incision and let him
grind my nipples with his Epstein pearls.
People ask: Is it true you couldn’t birth
your son between your legs in a barn?
I say: it hurts between my legs
just talking about it. The moon smiles
a kid-friendly grin, and I wonder
which finger Mary used to break
her god’s latch. I’m no Mary.
I chose to have a baby
in what my doctor calls a geriatric age.
I chose to have a child the year
the state called me Incubator.
Like Mary I can’t stop crying.
My doctor says: Call this number
if you get the baby blues. I pull
a cartoon smile from ear to ear.
In the dream feed I hear
a navy-blue voice calling,
calling me to drop my tired head.
The voice is blue. It calls blue.
It blue-calls, blue-calls:
No one wants to read about a mother.
On a walk with the blue stroller,
a bird calls: No wants to hear
about the mother unless it’s from the child.
I swaddle my son in a blanket so blue
it becomes a river blue, unlike
the brown rivers of my childhood.
The brown rivers of my childhood
that swallow mothers and their children
under currents woven in blue blood.
From the blue river I’ve wrapped
around his infant body, from the streetlights
that tint his room blue, a blue voice
calls me. It calls blue, calls blue:
Don’t write about becoming a mother.
Don’t write about being a mother.
Don’t write. Don’t write again,
you mother—