A pillow made of knuckles
Gerard Robledo
Holding my breath, I check for warm drool.
Are your eyes still rolling under their lids,
like searchlights draped with thin skins?
My ear pressed over your chest
– a stethoscope. Breath across
your shoulder, my lips in your palm.
I feel the long lines of your sputtering air
tunnel your lungs, then a pause:
in the moment of your birth, watching
your waterlogged lungs wrung out,
the exodus through your mother
– a reverse drowning. Exiting suffocation
with a slap, your forced first breath
– the trauma of birth. The last internal connection
with your mother, the umbilical cord,
supplied oxygen, nutrients. Everything tightens
and closes. Your breath must happen, now.
Mother’s blood and oxygen no longer available,
you are suffocating for the first time
– this first breath you must take is my marrow,
it makes me yearn for thirty more years
carrying your tiny wails & voice inside me,
behind my breast bone, pattering
next to my heart. That ardor halts
my razor’s horizontal movement when I shave.
You kick off the blankets I secured
under your delicate elbows, curl yourself
inward – my tangled Pill bug,
knees tucked, hands wedged between sheet
& cheek: a pillow made of knuckles.
their rounding end, almost brash,
jutting with the edge of breath,
like a sudden infant death: the syndrome
I still fear at your twelfth birthday.
Thank God she’s not a man,
and she’s half white, my mother said.
Uncountable numbers of breaths taken
since your birth. How many until my last? Following
the dependable raise & drop of your chest,
the quakes in my palms steady. I use
your sweat to anoint myself with a cross
– two lines intersecting above my eyes
where only I can feel its presence,
the spot my mother’s thumb carved,
while you rest huddled
like you’ve been crying alone all night.
