Amy Katherine Cannon

Laboring

rearing back against walloping pain
a rat trapped in a maze of self
one's own body, traitorous
nature has never cared
how much we suffer
in attending her sacred offices
of reduplication, proliferation
at any individual cost,
extravagant with casualties:
we visit cruelties on ourselves
and each other for the sake
of what we believe in
but the body persists
in clenching a downed wire:
experience, unadulterated.

Two Weeks

To nurse
To nuzzle
To nestle
To nest
To rest
To sleep
Too little

To swaddle
To settle
To clean up
Spit up
To sit
To pat
To have

To hold
To huddle
To hover
To whisper
To cry
When he cries
To realize—
To reify

Sleeplessness I

Sleeplessness slows the space
between heartbeats, extends
each breath,

Each cry, each refusal
to settle against my chest.
I press

you there, walk the same
slow circuit again, mandala-like,
immersed.

Against the grain of three a.m.
we turn again together
upstream

in a cold blue hour, asleep except
for us: insomniac—intractable,
unending consciousness.

Sleeplessness II

There's a kind of gentleness
to sleeplessness
a blurring
of the edges, a whirring
tinnitus, white noise
of passing hours' equipoise
on balanced, fragile edge
wedged
between dream
and the waking seam
of daylight:

my darling epiphyte
clings and curls
against morning, unfurls
a small hand pressed against
time, holding off a sense
of passage, the cold
turn of hours, the growing older.

Sleeplessness III

Your eyelids flutter—
fighting sleep, you utter
tired cries that bounce back
from walls: I learn each crack,
each creak in the floors,
each complaining door,
to shelter your egg-fragile sleep.
I have bounced you while you weep
for hours, could catalog the aches
induced by postures I make,
the curving toward you
I am made to do
by your existence,
your very squalling essence.