My Mother’s R & R by Galway Kinnell

My Mother’s R & R

She lay late in bed. Maybe she was sick,

though she was never sick. Pink flowers

were in full blossom in the wallpaper

and motes like bits of something ground up

churned in sunrays from the windows.

We climbed into bed with her.

Perhaps she needed comforting,

and she was alone, and she let us take

a breast each out of the loose slip.

“Let’s make believe we’re babies,”

Derry said. We put the large pink

flowers at the end of those lax breasts

into our mouths and sucked with enthusiasm.

She laughed and seemed to enjoy our play.

Perhaps intoxicated by our pleasure,

or frustrated by the failure of the milk

to flow, we sucked harder, probably

our bodies writhed, our eyes flared,

certainly she could feel our teeth.

Abruptly she took back her breasts

and sent us from the bed, two small

hungry boys enflamed and driven off

by the she-wolf. But we had got our nip,

and in the empire we would found,

we would taste all the women and expel them

one after another as they came to resemble her.