Making Children, Inside My Brother's Hot Blue Tent, I Wish I Could Swallow Myself

Three poems from The Terrible Baby

Making Children

 

Everything my mother cooked

she smashed the life out of--

all pancakes and hamburgers

flattened beneath the hot steel

of her spatula;

all children kneaded into shape,

all air bubbles squeezed out in

the tight fists of her maternal instincts.

 

I am an egg, hard boiled.

Drop me.

 

I learned to roll across the floor

without cracking,

to hold my breath to the

boiling point,

to become whatever color

she wanted me to be.

 

Sometimes she dressed me up

and carried me in a

basket like I was her baby.

When I cried,

she stuffed me with grass.

When I whimpered,

she hid me in bushes.

Inside My Brother’s Hot Blue Tent

 

When the first people came,

I was under the electric blanket with him,

huddled inside our makeshift tent,

the orange glow of the controls our campfire.

 

I was there when they came crawling

under the edges.

I watched them bite his skin

through the currents in his ears.

 

Years later they would tell him

that our mother poisoned his food,

that he must escape her at terrible costs.

 

But that first time he just screamed all night

while they ate out his dreams and I curled

against him, listening.

I Wish I Could Swallow Myself

 

When I was little I thought

my father would swallow me,

his mouth so wide I fell into it

every time he spoke.

 

Curved into my bed, my jaws so wide

my arms fit in. My body folds

back on itself like a sack.

My n*****s slip past my tongue.

I swallow down my hairless mound,

my thighs, my feet,

the neat package of my toes.

 

An ugly taste in my mouth wants water,

a drink from the dark bathroom

down the hall.

I lift my swallowed self onto my father’s back.

He carries me to the light.

 

I drink tepid tap water from the bathroom sink

under the powder blue ceiling,

the naked bulb hangs over my head,

a limp snake with a full throat.

Author's Note

Do these poems stir up your emotions? Do you relate to these poems? Did you have the kind of childhood I had?

Reviews

[Josie E. Cook M. A.]

Poetry always stirs some emotion while reading...
Relating to it is the key and knowing how is even better.

All 3 here are different in terms of emotions and relation.

You might try showing each one separately.