It's #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day's archives!
I’ve said I remember nothing of the first three months. But when I start peeling back the bleary out-of-body shroud, the stitches, the sitz baths, there’s the milk- stained blue couch where I woke in the blue light, turning off my alarm, turning on the yellow pump and the TV, every three hours another automatic emptying. An ounce or two, less than half of what you needed, the box of formula unopened in the pantry. The refusal to open, scoop, measure. Watching the famous California chef pipe Meyer lemon crème fraîche into an empty egg shell with the razor-cut cap, nothing had ever been so luxuriously precise. And I remember taking scissors to my head the next morning, wet hair punctuating the floor. Reading it like tea leaves, no room for pretty here. Milk extracted from my tits like lemon juice in the eye, like a man fighting the urge to cry. Thin cord of milk pulled reluctantly from the new abyss where your body used to be, haphazard grotesque, a rough white rope up through my breast is best No, I’ll never forget the sucking that yellow machine did when you couldn’t. How I would grind my teeth like I was coming down off ecstasy when the only thing left is the chills, the useless hollows of a body shitting and shivering, the threat of the flesh coming back, feverish and frigid fragile as 4 AM as baby an egg shell opened up and ready to be filled
Julia C. Alter received her MFA in Poetry from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and has appeared in numerous print and online journals. Recent poems can be found in the Santa Clara Review, Voicemail Poems, Fugue, and Stained: An Anthology of Writing About Menstruation. She lives in Vermont with her son.
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What a wonderful title!! It really draws you into the poem