Dorsey Craft

Taking Stock, Seven Months Postpartum

I am a tin can after a can opener,
lowest left rib popped out beneath
the swollen left breast, twice as large
as the right, milk-giver, endless
breakfast machine, nipples pink again,
permanently knobbed and I can’t
imagine ever allowing a lover
to place one between their lips,
or if I would even feel it. When you
first latched, in the NICU, the pleasure
came uncanny as a pomegranate,
seeds piling one by one against
the blasted tree of my desire before
I burned raw from the dry suck
of the pump. My waist is lower
on the left than the right. My dresses
all fit again, but I no longer love them:
bluebottle, ivy, marigold, asinine
like my chest-length hair that I’ve cut
to the chin I once felt something warm
dribble onto while breastfeeding--blood
flooded out of my nose onto the wisteria
of veins at your temple. My shirt ran dark.
Red flowering deep in your hair, you drank.

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Dorsey Craft is the author of Plunder (Bauhan Publishing 2020), which was the winner of the May Sarton NH Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blackbird, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of North Florida, serves as Assistant Poetry Editor of Agni and co-organizes the Dreamboat Reading Series with Jessica Q. Stark in Jacksonville, FL.