Shelled

Adults play at being each other,

prepare elaborate camouflage.

“Look! I’m wearing your face!”

But to play that sport with you, 

who knew the taste of my anxiety,

heard my machinery louder than me?

Small You?

And without the games? I didn’t know how.

The furrowed sovereignty of your face.

The needles that pricked you your whole one-week life.

Your separateness: a tsunami. 

No masks were left – the only face before me was yours.

And your otherness was opaque.

Once a fish in my belly, a giddy pet

who did laps, you now howled. 

Sorrow? Loneliness? Soreness?

Why didn't you come with a radar?

So I looked at you through a tunnel:

breast pump tubing, rolled blankie, a binkie

crooked and pipe-like in your mouth.

You wailed, I carried you, hunted

for you, four a.m., and I circled,

and you wailed, miles away from my body,

a warm paperweight, you doubted, I faked it,

and we paced, and we waited

for each other to land,

till I walked into stupor;

you, into separate sleep.