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.