Tag Archives: nursing
while jenny laughs, a poem
While Jenny Laughs
(originally published in Earth’s Daughters)
While Jenny laughs,
two large brown hawks
ride the currents,
swirling over our heads
like the occasional
dreams we’ve had
of flying — she and I
agree on this. She
raises her blouse
to nurse her son.
His wispy curls are moving
lazily in the air, too,
his tender scalp
the color of a ripe peach,
and as he nurses she
kisses his hand.
Since I cut my hair
short, she says,
people keep mistaking me
for a man. Her smooth
face is perfectly
symmetrical, her cheekbones
high pirouettes of pale
skin, lightly flushed and
freckled by the quick
heat of early summer.
I would never, ever,
mistake you for a man,
I say, and as her milk
flows into the baby’s
mouth she laughs again,
her high voice turning
into notes of clear amber
bells. Look at the hawks
one more time, I tell her,
and so, to please me, she does.
Filed under poetry
the conductress of milk, a poem
(originally published in Stirring: A Literary Collection)
The Conductress of Milk
I am a conduit, pure liquid medium.
It is like bleeding, I prostrate myself
to her lips, lay low while she sends
eloquent messages with her tiny, velvety hands,
her eyes dreaming, smiling. At 3 a.m.
she has the strength of a legend.
She grasps her own thumbs tightly
while she sucks on me. There is pain,
but not too much. I hew roads
through this darkness, telling her how one day
we will visit Paris, leaning over the old
sandstone edge of my favorite bridge
across the Seine. The passage exhausts,
yet chronicles how time can stand still,
how the illusion of eternity creates its own value.
I feel like an impostor — only the fact I’m lactating
convinces me I’m her mother. How quickly
she goes from one emotional state to the next —
she can be fussing one second and smiling
to herself the next. The silkiness of her cheek,
slick with spilt milk, is like angelwings.
She kicks her legs out straight while nursing,
moves her hands and arms like Leonard Bernstein
conducting — she moves her head for emphasis,
sometimes pulling back on the breast,
stretching the nipple. She smacks her lips,
then pops off and lets go.
She looks up at me, wide-eyed, but soon
drops off into a very pleasant looking
milk-sucking stupor, a milky drunkenness,
a milk-sucking intoxication. No wonder
we all ache for drugs afterward.
Filed under poetry
Kimberly Townsend Palmer 