Marking Him

Does my little son miss the smell of his first mother? I wonder as the mewl of his mouth opens toward a plastic bottle that is not her breast. Sudden new mother, I bury my nose deep into his skullcap of ringlets, his starry cheesiness. In her good-bye letter to him sealed in his album with a birth certificate, which now list my name as Mother, his first mother writes she nursed him briefly after he emerged into the second room of his world. I think of milk, volcanic and insistent, answering the newborn’s gigantic thirst, a primal agreement between generosity and greed. Sometimes I press my nose to the glass of that place where a mother and my child belong to each other; I cannot imagine coming between them. But then I want to lick him all over with a cow’s thick tongue, to taste him and mark him as mine so if the other mother returns, she will refuse her handled calf smeared with my smell.