by Ruth Moss
Repeats
Because you were my first, your birth
imprinted something on me, a pattern,
lacy-web doily seared to my flesh.
The bright bloom of the hospital room,
the pear-drop scent of April’s blossom
through window slit, angled TV all repeats,
choked me like ivy, as a machine breathed
plastic oxytocin into cannula,
through pierced skin to my veins.
That pain could have broken mountains.
They almost opened me up to get you,
like Hamelin’s hills, but
out you came with a smaller cut,
a sea of green scrubs steering you, blue, away,
bringing you back, a carmine throbbing thing
coaxing out colostrum with a tiny brawny jaw
(and ten years later, this pattern repeated
with your sister, see, I said it was tattooed)
before the stats, your levels, some number
meant you had to be taken, ‘in safe hands’
to one ward, I another, severed like your pulsing cord
(And you know, they wanted to do this
with your sister, too, and I said no, she stays
with me, anything you need to do,
you do with us together. That web, that lace,
that spring a decade later, I tore it and it came apart,
nothing but gossamer.) transfer flaking from skin.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ruth Moss is a 40-something writer and mother from Merseyside, UK. Recent work has been published in or is forthcoming from: Bureau of Complaint, Growing Up Vol. 2 (Pure Slush), Mundane Joys Anthology (Derailleur Press), NonBinary Review and more. You can occasionally find her on twitter: @marcie_hatter.