milk
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He lived on IV fluids for months.
Even the smallest trace of milk caused him to vomit blood. They told me to keep pumping, how good it would be for his system if he could ever tolerate food. And in this distorted dream-world, I let it be my mother-love (the grief and the milk both in endless supply), a way to express something even if the pots of ink were white. I didn’t see it until later, like in a dream that unfolds after waking, but you were there doing this: taking the bottles of milk in the night when I pumped them, or in the day, pouring them off into meal-apportioned bottles — so careful not to spill — and with black ink registering the day and the hour of our love, so that now, when I stand at the freezer, I see row after row of our duet of prayer and elegy stored against the day when he would live. |
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Ginger Hanchey is a lecturer in the English Department at Baylor University, where she specializes in Old English poetics. Her first poetry collection, Letters of a Long Name, is set to be published in July 2019 by Finishing Line Press. She has poems published in Nashville Review, Tar River Poetry, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere.