Dear Baby
Allison Cundiff
Dear baby who is crippling my own,
low left sciatica baby,
dawn sick water baby,
belly cramp in the deep baby
tailbone fracturing baby
perineum splitting of a girl baby:
While you were busy being born, your mother,
her once tiny waist, lay, smallish in the bed,
her blood pressure dropping,
twenty-two hours into labor.
It was three am and I was alone at her feet, rubbing, kneading.
The alarms going off, the nurses in scrubs rushed in,
and I thought you should know
I thought of how I might make myself die soon after.
I knew I would if anything
happened to that girl.
Here’s what I remember:
Years ago when my hair was a heavy braid down my back there was a boy who would come to the hall down the street from our gravel road. He was tall and not handsome. He would dance with every girl. His feet moved so fast he seemed to blur, all the lines of him collapsing into makeshift stage where the man who combed his hair in between every song, the lines of tonic neat and their scent strong in the barn lights. One night I snuck out late to meet him. I got dressed at ten pm, smoking a Kent stolen from my mother’s purse (one to smoke while at home, one for the walk to the hall). Before though, I stood with my hair in curlers and in my bra and looked at the line of clothes in my closet and chose the skirt that would look best when his arm circled my waist. When I was that age I didn’t know that one day I’d sit rubbing the feet of my daughter giving birth to you, her heart in trouble.
In a northern Missouri college town there’s a house on South Franklin I’d pass when walking home from the library late at night. The house had been boarded up for ten years, no one inside. I’d always make the sign of the cross when walking past since sometimes you could see a shadow in the window on the third floor and a person there reading in low light.
It feels good to light a match, to push your hand deep into a good glove.
There are things that don’t feel good too.
One day the girls’ pet fish got lost in the disposal and I had to
put my hand deep into the hole to cup his damp floundering,
but he lived. My husband’s hand was too big, and he just looked at me,
expecting me to let it die. But I did reach in.
I do like the earthy smell of the slouching puppy
lifted from his cedar warmth.
Like your body, from my daughter’s.
I think of you born now,
and the girl’s heart turned out alright
and I tell myself
I should write a poem about that too.
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Allison Cundiff is a Professor of English in St. Louis. Her publications include three books of poetry, Just to See How It Feels, Otherings, and In Short, A Memory of the Other on a Good Day as well as articles in Pragmatic Buddhist, The St. Louis Post Dispatch, Feminist Teacher, In Layman’s Terms, and Chariton Review.