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.