Wed Mar 10, 2010


His First Week

Wendy Wisner

I feared the blood on the sheet,
the knifey zap of letdown,
the choking spray of milk.
Each time he fell asleep, his death.
And when he wouldn’t sleep,
his gray, feral eyes.
My face: puffy, swollen,
as though I’d suckled at the amnion,
drowned in the birth pool.
And what if I did die,
what if he had no mother, no milk.
What if we never slept again,
and the world became dream
and the dream became world.
I feared the world,
the polar ice caps melting,
my son never knowing
winter, his life an endless summer,
his lungs, his skin, the boy
who had grown in my body
black and burning.
It was winter and the bedroom
was shot with bourbon light.
I folded him up in a blanket
and carried him through the apartment.
This is it, I told him,
the sink gleaming with dishes,
my old clothes in twisted heaps on the floor.


Tue Mar 09, 2010


His Dark Mouth

Wendy Wisner

The baby’s gone out with Daddy,
his stuffed tomato toy grinning up at me.
I hear spring for the first time this year:
sparrows gossiping, airplanes scraping rooftops.
I feel as though someone has removed a bone from my body.
My breasts swell but do not leak and I wonder
did it happen? Did a boy live
like a squirming fish inside my body? Did he slip
in and out of me, the bloated moon bobbing
in chapped winter sky? And the body
sprawled suddenly on my chest,
waxy, blue, and wailing—
was that the boy who sleeps each night
in the crook of my arm, his dark mouth
breaking my skin? I want him.
I want him back.


Mon Mar 08, 2010


Newborn Haze

Wendy Wisner

And sometimes I think of my own mother,
how we lay in the margarine winter light
girl skin to girl skin, her purple nipple
grazing my mouth, hands stung with onion,
hair floating across my face, the ceiling fan
ticking, ticking, and my father
fiddling with the camera, slides of me
falling onto the windowsill, his olive hands
carrying me through the black and white
haze of the apartment—nowhere to go,
nothing to do, the three of us
half-drunk, hungry, naked,
breathing together for the first time,
for the last time.