Poetry

Published on April 6th, 2018 | by Samantha Barrow

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Split: Poems

 

After Weaning

 

My tits feel like corpses

or rather

split logs after tree

 

I’m feeding my body to the fire

to service s’mores

& hang ash

 

After pulsing with light

and shade

living sap all abuzz

like it or not

 

Sticky gooey painful

weather

 

A singular firework of

immense god

 

Welcome to your new

fizzle

 

 

Split

 

She split my lip

with soft persistent fingers

nails the size of one hundred grains of coarse coral salt

Making me look like I took one on the mouth

or

there is some hard kissing at home

Nope.

It is a pinker shade of violent domesticity

that stings, awkwardly gaping

in the produce isle

straining to not

split back

 

 

Gratitude

 

Parenting is good for me

 

Tears of joy

well up and close in my throat

like vomit

from an unending wilderness of

ocean of

gratitude

with grand echoes of

Yeah, we know

            we’ve seen this before

            little buoy

 

This is a job — if any other — I would

have been fired from

 

No one gets to give such awful

job performance

again & again and keep the title and rags

 

But this one

these kids

just keep popping

right the fuck back up

like weeble wobbles

 

Smiles, needs and all impatient

fears

impossible timing

 

To claim me

& make me try again

 

Now

Now

Now

 

Photo by m kasahara / flickr creative commons license

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About the Author

Samantha Barrow writes poems and some prose while directing the Humanities in Medicine at the Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education at The City College of New York, and teaching in the Program of Narrative Medicine at Columbia.

She is the author of GRIT and tender membrane (Plan B Press), Jelly (a chapbook, Tiger / Monkey Alliance), and Chap (self published).  Her poetry, prose, reviews and interviews have been published in The Ledge Magazine, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia City Paper, Off Our Backs, Lesbian Nation, Feminist Review, The Intima, Cleaver, Helmet Hair and two Uphook Press Anthologies: “you say. say.” and “Hell Strung and Crooked.



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