I’ve been unsupported lately.
Not a leg to stand on.
Some would call it untethered.

Floating.

A kinder soul might liken it to flying,
But they would be wrong.

Flying starts and ends with both feet on the ground.

It is calm
It is sour on the tongue
And then sweet
A green apple
Rainwater
Just a capful.
Petrichor
In my living room
Behind the eyes
In my living room.

I am calm.
I am sour on the tongue
And then sweet.
A secret. In my living room.
Just a capful of rainwater
On the tongue.

It is calm.
A green apple.

It is calm.
Just a capful.

I place the pacifier not -in- your hand
But near it.

You surely will find it there
Right there
In the dark
When you are searching for comfort.

I nudge it a little closer,
Thinking of little girls whose parents don’t protect them
And wishing I could climb over these rails
Into this little crib
And hold you hold you hold you.

I bid the pacifier take over,
Sleep tugging me away from you with its persistent hand.
A curse, really, to abandon my post.

How many hours do we lose to sleep?
I would give them all up
To stretch this time out and out and out.
You, dreaming your mysterious dreams
And me, right there when you awaken.

Reclaiming my time
From tequila to lime
Breathing the air, and
Pretending it’s mine

I am out of practice.
So many parts of my former self swirl around like the last catch of a half-remembered dream.
I am out of practice.

Having a baby will change you, they say.
and they’re right.
I am changed.

But tonight I am the same me of a thousand me’s ago, the whole me, the core.

It’s hope.
That’s the instigator,
and I hope my daughter can see that.

Your whole me is worth fighting for.

There’s a spark
Cradled in the hot and glowing dark
Divine
And all mine
A hidden or forgotten corner
Once a wasteland
Now a hearth

(Burn this ******* forest to the ground)

Kindling catches
Discarded matches
Wild; raging
The brain detaches

My then boyfriend
Now husband
Never forgave you for putting your hand on my thigh,
Casually mentioning the ******* beaches in the south of France.
Your daughter needed a chaperone on your family’s upcoming vacation.

You went and I stayed of course
The ******* beach all the poorer for my absence.

I am not the kind of girl who
Finds herself at Disney Paris at the end of the movie.
That’s not the way this movie ends, anyhow.

12 years later
One lung lighter
Tens of millions denser
and poised to send your daughter
to Dartmouth
Or Tulane
Or anywhere she’d rather.

She’ll have everything the world could offer her
In exchange for her father.

A parent shouldn’t have to know.

So I forgave you the hand thing
And the lewdness of a drunken survivor
Poised on the lip of an ever-widening hole.

If you asked to take me now,
I think I’d go.
I’ve always wanted to see the Louvre.
I can almost hear it:
The clicking heels and murmurs,
Your overwrought humanities professor explanations of this or that and me humoring you with appropriate reverence as always,
And the dead certain silence of the thing we will not speak about,
Pointedly conspicuous in its absence,
Filling the space between.