Intake nurse: what brings you here?
How to tell him each minute
has become elegy
for the last.
I nursed
my daughter
yesterday, watched my leg
untangle for a moth’s trail,
resolve into a distance
between two points.
Watched my nipple seep
into the cracks of sustenance.
The baby I swear could pull
milk from my knuckle.
I am good for looking out windows,
following telephone wires to horizon
and in this stanza turning that dip—
there—into her collarbone.
By this stanza, it is again
just a wire.
I am sad, I tell the nurse.
On a scale of one to ten— ten.
My breasts have hardened,
leaked through my gown.
I unsnap it like it’s her onesie,
every movement
measured now
against my care for her.
The nurse hands me my manual pump
and turns away.
He talks of new pills—
hormone imbalances—
no more breastfeeding—I must
wean myself—while I extract the milk,
wonder the whole time
if recovery is possible
when I don’t know how to have a body,
just how to make one.
Somewhere, my daughter is waking
in her crib, lips puckered—ready
for what I can’t give her.
Somewhere, she is hungry.

Lindsay Adkins is a writer from Western Massachusetts whose work has appeared in Electric Lit, Narrative, great weather for MEDIA, Frontier Poetry, Crab Fat Magazine, So to Speak Journal, and Sugar House Review, among others. She is a recipient of the Amy Award from Poets & Writers, the Phyllis B. Abrahms Award in Poetry, and an Author Fellowship from the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She holds an MFA from Stony Brook Southampton. Read more at lindsayadkins.net.