I eat a ‘family size’ bag in 2 days:
today, chips;
two days ago, drops of peanut butter in candy shells.
You have been crying a lot.
It is normal. You are a baby.
"Colic," the doctor shrugs.
I do not wonder if because
I cried, gestating, over a romance begun long before
I met the XY component of you that's no longer
because I chose you, you cry now.
Now you flutter tongue on nipple,
decidedly unsexual, sleep with your lips moving
on a pillow on my lap. I cannot rest
you on inanimate objects: you cry
more. I respond to an email from my former
therapist, “I gave birth in August; we
are healthy,” remembering out of pocket pay
to narrate for her approval before
learning that my chaos was nobody’s
entertainment. She replies, “I am always rooting
for you." I try to take that in like the medieval Italian love poet
Giacomo da Lentini with amorous thoughts entering
from everywhere, like water to a sponge. The physical
therapist holds you so that I might perch on one leg and bend
at the waist to touch little plastic cones. I say, “second to me,
you may be the person that’s held him most." She passes
you back, nine-week baby; you smile.
Savannah Cooper-Ramsey is the author of Little Murder Poems (Moonstone Press, 2024) and Not Fit For Print: forthcoming titles (Waterhouse, Ltd., 2018). Savannah has a PhD in Italian from Columbia University and teaches in the English Department at The Community College of Philadelphia.
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