a plastic penguin in one chubby fist a plastic dolphin in the other i’m gonna be everything she says to the penguin everything i'm going to be E V E R Y THING i know what I’m going to be she turns to the dolphin everything i try to remember back to when I had that primal conviction a thin cognition in a blue bathing suit squinting into the sun and wonder the ways in which the intervening 36 years will whittle my daughter down to the exact approximation of her grown self the tortuous route by which she will be shaved into a woman
motherhood
Lost in a daydream
half asleep in a beach chair i imagine my body young and capable when we were children our mothers drove us places they waited read books knitted Afghans wore big hats to block out the sun they stood at a distance waiving their long arms for us to come back down the shore we had drifted too far my children are up the beach naked and rolling in the breakers a pregnant couple perched on tidy towels take pictures of their diminutive dog they don’t know who they are becoming so they set their sights on knowing their Pekingese our mothers were killing the currency of their lives in harlequin and back loop waiting agitated and petulant in the HOV lane for their lives to begin all the while watching their bodies decay at a rate slightly more accelerated than the arc of their children’s growth i doze the salt tightening on my skin hair crystallizing my children have drifted so far up the shore they are mere dots in the curve of the land
marks
When you came out of me, your eyes were black and hidden. You smelled like you felt: a softness under the hand. So soft, it seemed wrong to touch you, profane even. And that smell, was the smell of my womb, the place you came from, the place you were before I met you.
Every time I touched you, I left a print on your perfect skin, just as every time I smelled you and looked at you. A little print. Until one day, I was looking through layers of hand prints and smudges and stains and scars. You began to smell like milk, sweet and unpunishing.
All the inky smears and soot from passing cars, all the lesions and nicks, a cakey buildup of time; that is who you became. That is how you transitioned from being a tiny piece of god- flecked off from some divine orbit and into my body- to a human. One mark at a time.
This world is full of mark makers collectively imprinting themselves on one another.
Thoughts of Fire
She wakes up in the night, certain of death by fire. The house is so old, with its decorative crown molding, its stained-glass windows, its knob-and-tube wiring, its bricks in need of re-pointing, its sun-bleached deck gone to splinters and popped nails.
Their first year, they planted a peach tree and guided a trumpet vine up the wrought iron of the front porch. Although they watered it with clockwork frequency, the peach tree never bore fruit.
The trumpet vine, however, grew with abandon. It choked out the honeysuckle and the desert sage. It attracted ants and wasps. It grew alien pods the size of a baby’s arm that emitted a putrid, sweet stench.
The yard has since gone to dust, punctuated in places by bone-white tufts of scorched sod that make a satisfying crunch underfoot.
They’d had the best intentions but weren’t handy and were often tired.
The baby twists away from her, arches its back, and bleats like an animal. Eyes closed, still asleep, it searches for a nipple with its mouth, moving its head side to side. She takes the baby, twists it towards her, positions her nipple into its mouth. The baby clamps down and begins to suckle. Its body relaxes, slackening back into the waters of sleep.
There were days before babies and houses. She barely remembers them. Days before cars, even. Days where she was responsible only for her own body and whatever real estate it occupied on a moving subway car or a cafe seat. And even then, she felt too big, too unwieldy. She spent her evenings constructing complicated diet regimens and exercise routines, planning elaborate self-improvement retreats.
The next morning, as she pins each of her children down in succession and forcibly brushes their teeth, she can still smell smoke. She steps over the baby gate blocking the bathroom door and blows her nose on a square of toilet paper, surveying its contents for soot and finding none.
Later, there is a moment of silence. The silence comes just after a tearful drop-off at preschool but just before the baby in the back seat cuts her lip on a shard of plastic whose origin is a mystery.
In this moment of silence, she thinks, What do I want?
Nothing
And then the baby is crying. There is blood. The first blood ever shed by this tiny body. A contained vessel, punctured. A perfect prick on her upper lip that quivers intact for just a moment before the baby spreads it all over her face with clenched fists and snot and tears.
She stops the car to cry with the baby, gives the baby some milk, apologizes to the baby for how cruel this world can be.
Her thoughts are interrupted by more thoughts. Did she leave the oven on? It’s some strange European model retrofitted to their ancient outlets. Just one spark, and the house would go up like a tinderbox.
She is thinking about the triangle shirtwaist factory fire of 1911. All those women and girls locked in a burning building, then falling like cinders from 10th-floor windows onto the Manhattan sidewalks below. 1911. Wasn’t that the year their house was built? Or was it later?
She pulls the baby to her chest. I’m so sorry, she says. I’m so sorry.
It’s 8:30 on a Wednesday morning in a mid-sized city in the United States. A mother has pulled to the side of the road, commuter traffic roaring past, as she clutches her baby to her chest. She is sobbing and apologizing in turn.
What do you want?
Nothing
night reveals uncertain pasts
A smell wakes me. At first, I cannot remember where I am. A mattress on the floor of an unfurnished apartment. Lights from passing cars carve arcs across the popcorn ceiling. Have I vomited?
My one-year-old son is tangled somewhere in the sea of sheets. I slip about in my sweat. Or is it milk? Rotten milk that fell from my child’s open mouth, lost in a groove and smelling sweet.
I know this smell. It’s nothing like that. It is a smell from years ago. A trauma ICU. A mix of respiratory secretions and chlorhexidine mouth wash.
My first patient out of nursing school, a boy barely old enough to be treated in an adult ICU. Intubated and restrained, a smear of face under plastic and tubes. Hardly human.
Using a badge and a password, I access a robotic chest of drawers with hundreds of cubicles that disseminate medications. Fifteen drawer simultaneously spring to life. Tiny cups of liquid that resemble the complementary single serving jam containers at the chain restaurants lining interstate 85, to be inserted into nasal tubes, pre-loaded syringes for screwing into IV ports, glass vials for drawing up single doses of intramuscular injections. A horror show of wizardry designed to bypass human barrier systems.
My son swims to me across the expanse of mattress. He paws at my body, a kitten kneading for his milk. His sleep is sure.
The smell of death curdles in my chest.
The Dream
I dreamed I lost you. I combed the house and could not find you but I could still hear your noises through the walls, behind doors, from under the upturned corner of the rug. I screamed a scream that never ended. The thought of living a life where you were lost to me made my heart burst into my throat and I was chewing blood.