Savannah Cooper-Ramsey
By Four Months
My body anticipates your illness by overproducing
milk. I wake wet with it. You cry so much,
and neither of us truly sleeps. “Why?” I say, “Why?”
as I remember not to shake you in the least before
reaching down to cradle you, sweet, hot, and small.
We are both so tired: you from bawling in discomfort
and me listening awake to your changed breath
straining, clogged, and steady. With nobody
to watch us, I fear drifting off with you in my arms.
When your cold clears, I make lists. I think of them less
as milestones than as mutual awarenesses:
texture / pattern
voice
nursing—happy face
sing / dance
read
hold
laugh in your sleep
make milk to feed you
I live on WIC eggs and other government issue
foods. When the yolk moves through a hole
in the shell, I imagine an octopus slipping
its impossible sensory being out
from the tiny den it has made.
Savannah Cooper-Ramsey is the author of Little Murder Poems (Moonstone Press, 2024) and Not Fit For Print: forthcoming titles (Waterhouse, Ltd., 2018). Find Savannah’s poems in Bedfellows, BOMB, Cul-de-sac of Blood, Serotonin, and elsewhere. Savannah has a Ph.D. in Italian and teaches at The Community College of Philadelphia.