Blood, needles

The Source

I came into this world already in grief.

 

My birth mother had her handbag,
her blue cardigan. She was beautiful

 

in red lipstick. She left me behind
like a package on a city bus.

 

I stewed in my own hothouse
for months—pricked footsoles,

 

a nose of tubing. My own blood
was my best conversationalist.

 

O do not leave me, I said
of the cheerful yellow walls,

 

the glass case I was placed in
like a fairytale baby. It was all

 

too happy—the lab coats
and nurses’ shoes, the clean tiles.

 

Stay with me, I whispered
to the fingers with their needles.

 

Even pain was a beautiful touch.

 

I entered this pain entirely. It was
as pure as the Sunday twilight

 

I was born in. Hush,

 

my birth mother said. I whimpered
into the world as though

 

little had happened. Her love
was the leaving, was the source

 

I can never quiet—it has a heart,
a mouth, and our own dim bones.


Amanda Auchter is the author of The Wishing Tomb, winner of the 2013 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Poetry and the 2012 Perugia Press Book Award, and The Glass Crib, winner of the 2010 Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. Her recent work appears or is forthcoming at HuffPost, CNN, Crab Creek Review, Rhino, Rust + Moth, the Indianapolis Review, the West Review, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day. Follow her on Twitter @ALAuchter.