A Universe Composed of Solely Light

By Nancy Reddy

Of all the things I didn’t know before I did, 
there’s this: how, at bedtime, patting the babies 
down to sleep feels like romance.

When the boy breathes mama, 
or when the baby clamps his tiny doughy hands 
against my cheeks and plants a damp-lipped open-
mouthed kiss, I’m here in a bodily love
with the babies my body made.
 
                                    But what to say
of the husband? What name could praise enough
the man who rises in the middle of the night 
without complaint—or, with occasional
cursing only—to comfort the crying baby 

whose snot-crusted nostrils won’t let him breathe?
The man I married could make a perfect daiquiri
and loved my ass in a corset and heels. 
He had never changed a diaper. 

                                                And here we are, 
love, inside the long future that we promised, 
in the lavender light of 3 AM, one baby 
whimpering in his crib while the other’s 
a hot and restless heft between us in the bed.

Nancy Reddy is the author of Pocket Universe (LSU, 2022); Double Jinx (Milkweed Editions, 2015); and Acadiana (Black Lawrence Press, 2018); and co-editor, with Emily Pérez, of The Long Devotion: Poets Writing Motherhood (UGA, 2022). The recipient of a Walter E. Dakin Fellowship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Sustainable Arts Foundation, she teaches writing at Stockton University.

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