This is your kingdom— where applesauce is currency and glitter is law. Where socks vanish into portals beneath the couch,
By Elena Vale9 months ago in Poets
You won’t remember the way I cut your toast into hearts every Tuesday. Or how I let my coffee go cold just to stay beside you
You are not mine to keep. Though sometimes, in the quiet hum of bedtime, I forget that. I tuck you in like I’m sealing up the world.
I was rocking my child to sleep when it hit me— I am someone’s baby, too. Somewhere, my mother remembers the weight of me in her arms,
There was a version of me before this. Before diapers and night feeds, before tiny shoes lined up by the door,
What if I’m not doing this right? I ask myself on the floor of the laundry room, halfway between mismatched socks
You finally fell asleep— after the stories, the water, the bathroom trip you insisted you didn’t need until you did.
I hid in the bathroom today. Not to cry— though that came later. Just to breathe in a room where no one was saying my name
Last night you called me Mama. Like always. Like forever. But the sound was rounder, sharper somehow— as if your voice had swallowed a year
It wasn’t when you were born. Not when you first cried or curled like a question mark against my chest. It came later—
Gloves off in the rose beds, we kneel not in prayer but rebellion— trowels scraping against the neat borders they drew
They said bring pies so we brought axes disguised as rolling pins our aprons starched white as surrender flags
