Our baby's breath is small and white, and it smells like milk.
I used to lie, senses open, in the path
of your heavy sleep, watching your giant mouth hang slightly open,
your girlish lashes flutter tinily. Your breath
smelled of beer and Mexican food,
your skin like chiles and sweat.
It was hot. We were broke.
Her breath is sedative, a hot toddy.
It might as well sound like warm rain, the kind I wake to wondering
why did I sleep in? Because the rain is still resting its grey sleep down.
A rare mid morning, and on her face, your ample mouth puckers.
Your eyelashes on her eyes. Twitch-crack--and
up.
2 comments:
very stream-of-consciousness
(baby's breath made me think of the plant, not sure if deliberate & desired & ambiguous, or a way around that)
fresh lines for me were breath as small and white, breath as sedative.
you could do something else with the smells like milk - use the idea of it, but make it actually smell to the reader. sweet, sour, palpable, delicate, faint all that jazz
i think you can push the language and ideas more in spots like that, tighten in spots like the rain, which doesn't feel like it belongs except as comparison to breath
an interesting idea - the similarities between sleeping newborns & sleeping men, heh. that vulnerability we all have when prone and unconscious. or whatever the poem is really about to you -
explore it. could go dreamlike, breathy linebreaks, very rhythmic so on.
might be a good poem to play around with a set structure you feel fits.
It's funny, I was contemplating the breath of babies the other night and thought that I should write a poem about it. You beat me to it!
I agree with andie that we need something other than the simple "milk" because I feel like it's not evocative enough and could mean different things to different people.
Love the first line of the second stanza. Perfect.
I'm not crazy about the end. I get that it's supposed to be a little jolting, as in the jolting of someone suddenly awake, but I feel it doesn't work here. I can't put my finger on it, just a gut feeling.
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