Last night, a baby cried
outside my window and I knew
I should be holding it.
I was pretty sure
she was talking to me, my own baby
a thousand miles away,
grown hazy, not as clear
as the music from the courtyard.
I brought the hand pump
in my backpack and it took all day
to draw an ounce.
My baby and I are near the end.
It’s no one’s fault—each day
I have less to give,
less milk, I mean.
There’s a magnet in me—
it’s just a metaphor, so it’s OK
that the pull is stronger
over distance. Let me return
to that baby in the courtyard,
to its terrible music
and how I wanted to go
to her, give to her.
And I cried a little, the way
mothers cry, and catch it,
and place it in smallest mouths,
so this morning there was a glass of it,
of milk—what the body repels
as it pulls the other to us.
The world is dense with hunger.
Sometimes I have to pull his fist
from my baby’s mouth
just to feed him,
and I am mindful that hunger for some
is a fist that never stops
being a fist. What I’m trying to say
is I couldn’t dump that milk.
For the baby in the courtyard,
for my baby, for all
the babies, I drank it down.
Photo by Wade Kelly