Elegy for the Village

By Alafia Nicole Sessions

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            Perhaps we were designed to lactate
in groups, considering that breast milk comes
in no earlier than the second day postpartum,
that colostrum, precious liquid gold, adds mere
drops to the previously, continuously filled fetal
stomach, that a mother, who may have labored
for 48 hours straight or more, without true, deep
restorative sleep, without nourishment, might still
be between worlds, having left herself to gather
her child’s spirit, to lay her own maiden spirit to rest,
that in feeding this seemingly new being every two
hours, sleep becomes just out of reach, like a cloud
you are inside of but cannot rest your head upon,
that the recipe for abundant milk is more nursing, rest,
that the cure for plugged ducts is more suckling,
that the way to soothe a colicky baby is to feed,
the way to break in the breast is to let the tender
tissues of the nipple harden to bark. I’m asking,
having winced when my own sister offered to feed
my baby, having declined because I did not yet
understand how vast a freshly opened woman is
stretched, what more can two newly gilded glands give?

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Alafia Nicole Sessions lives in Atlanta. She is a nominee for Best New Poets and the winner of the Furious Flower Prize, selected by Evie Shockley. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Cincinnati Review, Ecopoetry Anthology, Southern Humanities Review, Indiana Review, Radar Poetry, Los Angeles Review, Obsidian, Gulf Coast Journal, and elsewhere. For her work, Alafia has received an award from the Sustainable Arts Foundation and a fellowship from Yaddo.

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