Two Poems

Adelaide

My body
is building
another body
and I grip the
train pole
to forget
for a minute
how I’m leaving
my other life.
My shored-up,
shipwrecked body
is calling it quits:
here is where
we stop, say
we’ve had enough
of this flopping, gasping
stomachfish,
enough of the
empty sweetness
sleep’s become.
These days
I’m all mouth:
milk-hungry,
never mooning,
my animal baby
leeches the calcium
from my bones.
I imagine them latticed.
I imagine her too:
deerlike, bent.
Unsprung coil full
of perfect guts,
I’m making you
as you unmake me.
I’m not ready
to be your mother.
I’m calling your name
so you’ll know.

You Squinted Out From A Skylight Of The World

The loss was so automatic.
For months I was full of you—
globular thing, tumbling into
yourself, alive the way gut flora
is alive. At night I felt your elbows.

Together we grew quiet and strange,
kept cans of grape soda in the fridge,
drank them flat. I could feel your wanting
on my lungs, the way you would press them
practicing breath.

Now that I am alone in my body again
I miss you.  Now that you’re alone
you flail in your crib like a caught fish.

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This poem takes as its title a line from Seamus Heaney’s Squarings (1991).

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Aimée DuPont holds an MFA in Poetry from Hunter College, where she has taught Creative Writing and Composition.  Her poems have appeared in Miscellany and she has been the recipient of a Mary M Fay Award and an Academy of American Poets prize.  She lives and works in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn.