Women's Poetry: Poems and Advice

Inside All This

27 Inside All This Worn Eeyore in lavender, fur on Tigger abrading. The tag sale mobile dangles its dolls and mirrors. Inside all this, a baby laid on its stomach, irritably scraping its face back and forth in its sleep, snail trails of snot widening and widening on its eczema’d face and over the sheets like soap the squeegee man fans on the outside of a store window till the baby’s nearly awake in fear or rage or half-consciousness (which are only all need) so you pick it up before it wakes in time to fold it in the darkness of your body— it cries awake anyway, because you were so happy you picked it up before it cried, because wrestling up out of sleep comes from nowhere in the mind like the whooped-up druggy partying of soldiers behind a sieged barricade, because otherwise dying, or something, gets remembered. bring me to the singing place bring me to the singing place bring me to the singing place locks on doors, bolts shoot loose big bare hands on bare big shoulders ...