Does my little son miss the smell
of his first mother? I wonder
as the mewl of his mouth
opens toward a plastic bottle
that is not her breast.
Sudden new mother,
I bury my nose deep
into his skullcap of ringlets,
his starry cheesiness.
In her good-bye letter to him
sealed in his album
with a birth certificate, which now
list my name as Mother,
his first mother writes
she nursed him briefly
after he emerged into
the second room of his world.
I think of milk, volcanic
and insistent, answering
the newborn’s gigantic thirst,
a primal agreement between
generosity and greed.
Sometimes I press my nose
to the glass of that place
where a mother and my child
belong to each other;
I cannot imagine coming
between them.
But then I want to lick him all over
with a cow’s thick tongue,
to taste him and mark him as mine
so if the other mother returns,
she will refuse her handled calf
smeared with my smell.
Margaret Hasse, “Marking Him” from Milk and Tides, published by Nodin Books. Copyright © 2008 by Margaret Hasse. Reprinted by permission of Margaret Hasse.
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