Sticky with a summer cold,
she adheres to me,
at home in my body heat even in August,
and wakens every few minutes,
each miniature night completed.
Vine tendril reaching
toward a sturdy branch, her mouth gropes
in the darkness
for a breast to attach to, one of these
spent, wrinkled breasts,
sucked dry, miraculously never empty,
like the magician's pitcher,
always some liquid left,
poured out again and again
before applauding audiences.
Some morning
they will find on the bed beside her
my form—
a dry cicada shell, brittle, empty
save for air and longing,
while the thriving baby kicks the sky,
her round, milk-flesh
full of future and all my poems
and memories
churning in her metabolic tract.
Maureen Tolman Flannery's fourth book is Ancestors in the Landscape: Poems of a Rancher's Daughter
. Having grown up in a Wyoming sheep ranch family, Maureen and her actor husband Dan raised their four children in Chicago. Her work has appeared in many journals, recently including Pedestal, Atlanta Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, and Calyx.
