Julia C. Alter
The Nursing Chair
It’s an off-white chair, a chair that sits
four feet from a TV in a house
that’s somehow only five minutes
from me. It’s empty, holding only
the grimy imprint of a heavy body,
the imprint I glimpse through a window
in the dark. The body belongs
to my son’s dad, who has paused
the game on the screen to grab another beer
from the kitchen. It’s Sunday again, and again
I’ve avoided this all day—dropping
our son’s packed lunchbox in his backpack
on the busted deck because how can a gray shadow
make a sandwich? This is his throne now,
where he rules the blue light, the first-person
shooter fighting off zombies at every turn.
The first person who ever sat in this chair was me,
nursing the baby that used to be our son, deep
into the milk-blue nights, fighting my own monsters.
Now he’s half my son, and half his son.
This is his dad’s gaming chair, and he’s sleeping
upstairs on a mattress on the floor. I can’t see him,
so I build the shape of him in my body,
where I trust he keeps the shape of me,
and keeps the milk that made him.
Julia C. Alter is the author of Some Dark Familiar (Green Writers Press, 2024), selected by Matthew Olzmann as the winner of the 2023 Sundog Poetry Book Award. Her poetry has been nominated several times for the Pushcart Prize, and appears in journals and anthologies. She lives in Vermont with her son.