Just now,
after two ***** cranberries
Errol burst into tears.
He began with an aching whimper,
but loud,
and my little self boiled with indignation,
this "how dare you take my time--this is my time"--
my time to watch pause-able movies, and read endless Facebook posts.
Secondly, after a tiny moaning cry
I run into the room
and in the black find him
to pluck him from his sad dreams.
There is the happiness
though,
the thing those mothers yap about
covered in hair, ***** from a week's sweat,
the tired, collapsing hug of an infant
wakes me from my drunkenness
to weep.
I bring him into the light and he releases from the crook of my neck to stare with wrinkled eyebrows
and I wonder what I am:
This woman,
a smell,
a voice,
a flowing, shadowy goddess who rescues a sad boy from sick dreaming.
Then he plucks at my nose and nnns.
Then ears.
Then laughs.
Then sighs in a real, big, adult way that shrinks me.
As I carry him sideways into the kitchen I wonder,
will he write stories about the late evenings and his mother's red glass?
Drunk mothers and the babies who love them.
