Postpartum
- Postpartum
day: take it apart: not day. Pull the vein of midmorning,softly, with tweezers: coil on a stainless steel tray.
Glass on your bureauslices the light, spackling it onto clock face
the day is not long nor scheduled nor marked by light showwhat is said about days is not so
any longer had it ever been sonot day, a haunch of animal:raw, dead, injected.
When not injected or recently pricked: shivering.You wonder is this the way I can count the time? Sets between fits, seismographically insignificant fits, accounting sweat drops, tick off crumpling fingers.
You feel certainly that you should benefit. Would benefitfrom a pill or some: make day=one thing+next thing.Next thing+next thing+happens+
inject?+traction makes it go+so so so: Day.
Midmorning, you find the sideways sun accommodating, polite.Conversational: you are prodded, pleasantly, a maybe open orange, being in a something that feels like a mitten or the sound of soft palate but not the actual, you get a coiled, threaded softly around the fingers like a reminder, but gentler and lest this turn out to be not so and it is always not what you want, so yes [End Page 152]
Midmorning lies. Like that terrified limb do we know ifits pain is phantom or if it is, what if it isphantom and ghosts like that of bodies like thatare what you feel and when you
say: this hurts and this hurts and this and this and that. Theblanket hurts too, day-touched, mood-swung, fibrous andreceptacled: the sun rising to apex means to
kill. Should you be able to lie naked under this sun, you wouldbe healed iswhat you say if only you could [End Page 153]
Kate Rosenberg lives in rural central Pennsylvania, where she is raising her daughter, teaching writing, and occasionally scribbling down a few words. She received her mfa from the University of Arizona, her PhD from the University of Utah, and has been published not widely, but not narrowly, either.
