Outnumbered Two to One

When I saw this week’s Spin Cycle topic - Creative Writing - I got excited. I wanted the opportunity to wow with my literary prowess, to flex my brain biceps amidst the oohs and aahs of an adoring crowd, to write something spectacular. Unfortunately when you’re at the keyboard, faced with the limitless possibilities of a stark white screen, well…it can be a little intimidating. All those promising, inspired ideas, vacate the premises like so much fog.

It also doesn’t help that every time you get a word down, someone somewhere screams “Moooooommmmmyyyyy” at the top of their lungs, or crawls in to your lap to try and poke your eyeballs out, or decides right now they need a Popsicle more than anything on God’s green Earth.

So much for channeling genius.

Instead of coming up with something wholly new and original, I give you this…a poem written several years ago and inspired by some multiples’ mom in the news at the time. It’s all I had that was even remotely related to parenting, although I suppose it still treads a little on the dark side…

Multiples

Eventually she found herself
drowning in babies,
licking formula
from her bony wrists and
shaking cornstarch from
brittle stalks of hair
where dark roots grew
like blackened weeds.

Sometimes she wondered
who would love a woman
with hips seven babies wide,
a woman with rubber nipples
for eyes and a scar
like a fixed grimace
smothered beneath
the cotton of her dress.

At night she dreamed them awake,
tiny toothless mouths,
gaping black ovals in a tangle
of dimpled arms and legs,
loud enough to scare
the quiet from her skin
and hungry enough
to suck their mother
through the neck
of a bottle.

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