Lisa Ludden Perry
Blue Hours, the NICU
-After and grateful for “Blue Hour” by Carolyn Forché
Time is a clutching longing. Breathing deep into my hands like breath on a cold day, I saw something close to breath assembled, a body constructing itself—you. Your form, sudden, slight, underdeveloped, unfinished—what does it mean to be a finished body? Are we ever more than clusters of air and cells? Air, clutched like a fist, molecules sifting through fingers, circling this concrete blue of a room, meandering blue, this pause in time. A pump thrusts your chest up. Hold. Drop. Scrape. Monitors measuring breath, numeral blue, tracking interruptions. I breathe into your soft forming skin, pretend this air is wind and we are under a bluebird sky. Wind across our faces transcends this artificial blue, medicalized womb blue. Blood before skin is cut blue, how can you rest in this incessant blue hum and buzz and beep and thump, machine blue, ambient blue, the constant beating of my heart blue, watery blue, glass blue, I am blue, sterile blue, baby blues. Breath extends, expands, collects in shallow pools when it cannot move through the lungs. Pressurized breath in time, slowing, deepening, unravelling, repairing. We were there and somehow, we held.
Lisa Ludden Perry is the author of the poetry chapbook Palebound. Recent poems have been featured in Fourteen Hills, Colorado Review, The Dodge, and Epiphany. Her current prose examines female anatomical language in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, while telling the story of her own reproductive landscape. She is one of the coeditors for the upcoming anthology, What is Your NICU?: Redefining the NICU Experience from a Maternal Perspective, from Demeter Press.