So much of writing looks like nothing,
a nothing that gathers dough-like
in the fingers, slipping away, if you are a mother
not often at your desk:
days of lunch assembly, housecleaning, camp-form filling,
Pokémon-card getting, Lego assembling—
my mind felt the way my body did,
after the C-section, when C was born:
as if it would slip apart,
just fall apart, in two halves.
I don’t remember standing
after he was born. I don’t remember much—
thirty-six hours of labor, botched anesthesia,
passing out from the pain.
I recall only my mother saying of her own, years ago
(to a friend? to me? before my first surgery?):
When I stood up, I felt I had been hit by a truck.
I stood up in the room.
Moving around, I could tell my body
had been cut in two.
I thought about Rothko, somehow:
segmented pieces.
I answered e-mails, sent the birth announcement
while he was sleeping—his father gone
home to bed—and I stayed
up with the baby, nightmarishly waking
whenever it cried.
I wanted to sleep,
having been cut in half;
having been turned from one to two.
I didn’t want the nurses to take the baby away—
after nursing, I fell asleep with the infant
in my arms (six hours of sleep
over three nights of labor),
and the night nurse, checking on me,
shook me and scolded:
“Mom, you cannot do that.
You cannot do that.”
As if I were acting out a choice.
An entire apparatus of “care”
($47,561 of it)
and no one could think to help me
put the baby back in its plastic bassinet,
wrapped so all one could see was
the warm tender head.
Then I asked and they took him
to the nursery. And I slept.
When I woke, I gulped for air.
He was not there. I noted, within,
that I had already placed him
in an institution’s arms, away from me,
for my own convenience.
Somehow, I made it across the floor
with my walker, each step sending
waves of nausea and pain and dizziness,
a whole-body No—
and there he was, being washed
and tended to by the nurse,
who cooed at his length, the way he
instinctually kept curling into a C.
Not me, but a piece of me,
ripped out and sectioned into life.
These days that look like nothing
gather to something
not in the notebook,
a life split in two
spent helping the little thing
come to be.