Baby-Tick, Baby-Tock

Man, I must be getting old. I keep finding all these poems about having children and I don't reject them out of hand as "mommy poems." My biological clock is out to get me.

The History of Mothers of Sons

Lisa Furmanski

All sons sleep next to mothers, then alone, then with others
Eventually, all our sons bare molars, incisors
Meanwhile, mothers are wingless things in a room of stairs
A gymnasium of bars and ropes, small arms hauling self over self


Mothers hum nonsense, driving here
and there (Here! There!) in hollow steeds, mothers reflecting
how faint reflections shiver over the road
All the deafening musts along the way


Mothers favor the moon—hook-hung and mirroring the sun—
there, in a berry bramble, calm as a stone


This is enough to wrench our hand out of his
and simply devour him, though he exceeds even the tallest grass


Every mother recalls a lullaby, and the elegy blowing through it