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Feed
by Emily Mohn-Slate

Wind whips the umbrella on the porch like a ship’s sail
               I watch it twist         and lean over the counter eating   numb-eyed
 
                                                    The baby rolls in the monitor’s blue fuzz
              and I calculate how long until he needs to eat again
 
                                                               I’ve been going for months        If I stop, I will be ordinary
                                               All I want to do is feed myself bread and milk
 
                                            I cut the baby out of the poem
                           I put the baby back in
 
                The geese are migrating somewhere
One lags behind      veering
 
                            unsatisfied by its pocket in the V
                                           the group’s squawking mind to move
 
                                                                maybe hating those beating bodies ahead
              I need the baby to take a nap               I need the baby to not need me          
 
                               I never meant to be so needed            
                                                                                                                           I dream about drifting            alone
              I can’t quiet my ambition
    It bats at my knees and I toss it scraps
 
                                           hoping it will reward me for wrenching off each finger
each thick arm    my teeming head   
 
dropping them      one by one      into the black well of its jaws

Emily Mohn-Slate's recent poems are forthcoming or have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Indiana Review, Cimarron Review, The Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. Her manuscript, The Falls, was a finalist for the 2016 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize offered by University of Pittsburgh Press. She teaches creative writing at Chatham University and lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
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​& then she wailed & screamed & coughed on her own drool 

June 2017
ISSN 2157-8079
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