Breaking Through by: Julie Wells, mixed media, 2015.
Buenos Tiempos Vienen
by: Franklin Posh
My beautiful baby girl. My beautiful, suffering
baby girl who, when you asked me to stay,
spoke the words as if it was all you’d ever wanted;
as if it would have been enough to keep me.
My tender one, my doe-eyed, puddle-eyed,
starry-eyed organic madness. Your heart is
so full of chaos that I’m drawn to you; I am
in love with you and I tell everyone about you.
The people at work and the grocer and the ones who live
in the apartment next to me that I drink with on Friday
and the trashman and my parole officer and your mother—
who won’t let me see you anymore because I wasn’t being
gentle. I’m sorry that I sometimes get carried away.
I swear I would never do anything to hurt you.
I talk about you all day long, about when you were
just a baby, and how I cried watching Momma give birth
to you: that shock of chestnut-brown hair that stuck up from your cabeza
and your squishy flesh, like over-ripe mangos; and your
pursed, mumbling lips, pink and pulpy like two tiny wedges of grapefruit.
I asked Momma to pick you up and feed you, but she was upset so she
yanked you out of the crib. Your head jerked back,
your little body flailed like a sheet on a clothesline in the wind,
and then I had to punish her for hurting you.
I’m sorry you had to watch.
Mi cielo, mi vida. Momma and I have put so much chaos in
your precious little heart—big enough to hold all the ugliness
of the world and still it’s overflowing with tenderness.
I swear sometimes being human feels like
one hand trying to stop the other from strangling yourself to death.
Buenos tiempos vienen.