Milk

by Ana María Caballero

 

At first, infants love us for our colostrum.

A few days later and perhaps for months, our milk.

Eventually, though, children love us for nothing.

My children love me for nothing.

Define nothing: the breadth between caregiving and caretaking.

I never forget to call my mother whom I remember to never forgive.

My children cry when I leave their sight, though I invent alleyways through which to depart.

And yet: I’m most myself when I’m alone, pressing hard against my sleeping child.

Define alone: a mass of uncut bread.

Or else: the bellow of a cow at dawn.

Meanwhile, my children’s range, their capacity, expands.

I hold pictures of them as babies and cannot recall their size upon my breast.

Was I there?

As a youth, I scuttled through alleyways to escape my mother’s hearth.

I hurt from loving too much and not enough.

Time leaves my sight.

What I cannot stand about my mother is the way she reminds me of myself.

Am I here?

I have never been this old.

 

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