Associate Editor Caitlin Doyle: In “Postpartum,” Kate Sweeney approaches the subject of motherhood in fresh and bracing ways. Sweeney’s tonal deftness, an accomplished combination of humor and austerity, imbues the poem’s imagery with layers of ever-mutable meaning. The tension between tenderness and fierceness keeps readers just enough on edge to remind us that overly sentimental narratives of child-rearing, so prevalent in popular culture, can never adequately contain the complexity of the experience.
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Postpartum
The thoughts, now, are sticklike—
washed-up driftwood
on a beach I will never walk,
at least not while wearing a bikini.
The scent of the neighbor’s
confederate jasmine brings me back.
I drink wine on the patio
while she hangs off my breast,
more dreaming than suckling
at the unsunned bulb, so pale
against her face still fighting
the last creepings of jaundice.
The whites of her eyes
just a tint too yellow.
You have to drink like a frat boy,
my sister, the OB, tells me,
for it to get into your milk.
Don’t worry.
Don’t worry. Don’t worry.
My husband confesses he loves
our son more. The toddler
who throws all his toys into the pool,
already knows how to lie,
and rips out fistfuls
of our German shepherd’s hair.
Just bite him, I’ve hissed to the dog.
But I am guilty too, of loving her
fistfuls more, how her hands clench
with such longing yet hold nothing,
like the hooked tails of the squirrels
that chew through our porch screens
and which I’ve resolved to scare off
someday if the kids are finally asleep
and I ever learn to shoot a gun.
Kate Sweeney is the author of the chapbook Better Accidents (Yellow Jacket Press, 2009). Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, Meridian, Tampa Review, and Poet Lore, among others. She is currently a stay-at-home mom.
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