Mean Mommy

After a few weeks off getting the semester started, I've finally drafted a poem (YAHOO!)

Mean Mommy

You wake to the liquid dark. You wake to
the new container of your elastic
body.  You wake to cold sweats, small femurs,
and wrist bones fossilized into your flesh.
You wake to shadows breathing in corners
of what could come what could enter and take
away what you love.       Days slur drunkenly
by --fat with syrup and homemade pancakes
(FROM SCRATCH!).  Days made of: diapers and wipes and
mismatched brittle laundry.         There are days when
you look head on at your face in the mirror.
When you can see through your elastic skin
into what’s underneath: geometry
of bones and at its center a hearth of rage.

You wake to the dark empty before dawn. 
You wake to the slit of night light.  You wake
into the new routine of meal to meal. 
The bend down and pick up the wrapper on
the floor, check the laundry on the way out.
Some mornings you wake before the others.
You open the door into the yawn of
dawn into the deafening chorus of
sea birds and raptors and blue jays into
the air that is fresh and possible with
fog and you feel the perimeter
of your own body return to you.

But footsteps THUD! into closer  into
the open belly of the house. And night
slurs into the noise of day. The stuffing
of bodies into clothes and the packing
of (NUTRITIOUS!) lunches.          These days when you
look head on at your face in the mirror
and see beyond the bone cage, the raging
belly hearth to the bedrock beneath:
 a mountain lake gone slack and cool.   
A lake that burns with its origin of ice.