Thursday, August 6, 2015

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.




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