--
An
estimated 116 million babies will be born under the shadow
of the COVID-19 pandemic, UNICEF said today --
I think a
balcony a porch
a
lookout station in the green
restive
as the breeze set to stir by noon
where bold boulders ladder climbers
to
an upper echelon of possible shade
The sleep-station is a computer squeezed
in a palm's sweat
The nap is not festive a perineum to
rip
allowing
birth's preference to come clear
through
a deepblue tissue erased into/out
of pain
I think a pain
that repeats in every
birthgiver's journal all the
narcotic
allegiances of what-i-would-have-givens
like
someone traced a line
in sugar around your
right
hand left it afloat in a pledge
to be suckled by
hummingbirds when everyone but you
leaps
to sleeping again
I think a porch a pain a
sugary outline think
probable maternal analogies since
my
experience there has
shaped
what
this balcony balances
against
the
brick- wall of straining to
suggest an edge
of the desperate which we all
scale
in
personal terms not visible to
the
popular
brink at which mothers sew cotton masks for others
while their own jaws sting in a bare-brutal heat
It
doesn't matter how pretty the day
The
perineum stitches itself
to
the sides of glistening highrises
holding back the
automatonic enfoldment in a moment's
sudden stride to the handrail
A
piercing look into the gaping idea that
slides shut as the infant whimpers awake again
and
thank god for the immaculate timing of
being
radiantly
needed
I think a
balcony's integer of breath
to
wish the cusp of hand cupping a fontanel
the pulled-taffy
tonic of a four-minute visit back into the self-remembering body
slow
as a synchronous look across the hallucinatory
city
of new mothering
Margaret Christakos is a poet living in Toronto, who remains attached to
this earth. Her most recent collection is charger, published by
Talonbooks in Spring 2020.
