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Morning Meals by Tess Satsuma
Morning Meals
by Tess Satsuma
When you wake up,
breasts covered in cotton
by Batman’s head,
your son dreaming blank walls
in his room,
I mix oatmeal, margarine,
(the milk your child does not drink),
into a metal bowl, my blurred face
softening
beneath my working palms.
I wait for you to watch me
bake this breakfast for you both;
I wait for you to see my nightgown
glow against my body somehow,
before you
turn the news on,
before you
turn my skin beneath the silk,
into the restless spell
I have become.
As your son enters,
his hair a golden pause
of youth beneath the skylight above him,
I clench my thumb against the bowl.
I watch him play, a twelve-year-old,
with his own saliva as if it were a lake
pouring
from his mouth.
You went to his room again last night after his
sixth scream.
My hands were alive then; they were so
alive;
how they combed through
the smothering current of your absence; how they
met the envelope of your sealed weight,
closed tight around the body of your only boy.