In the mornings, after I’ve just woken up, my belly is hard and pulsing. The baby likes the right side and curls there until I get up and gravity centers us again. The pulsing feels like a wound, when all the blood rushes to one place in your body and you’d swear your heart was beating right there, not your chest.
This photo was taken about a week ago. We are 19 weeks today, the size of a large mango according to one source, an heirloom tomato according to another and moving around like a squid. I’m starting to feel it’s whole body shift from one side to another, especially in the mornings when I’m on my back; an entire muscle burrowing back and forth followed by a few spasms of leg or fist.
We’ve been listening to Sylvan Esso and Zoe Keating, the White Stripes, The Lumineers, a little Lauryn Hill. The good stuff. This kid will have great taste in music.
Pat and I have both had dreams the baby was a boy, but that same dream I had a wasp fly up my ass, so I’m not sure if it’s reliable or not. Did I write that here already? I can’t even remember. The baby is eating that too, my brain, which has made writing a little difficult these days.
I’m trying to get a chapbook together. Sound easy right? 25 poems, that’s it. But I’ll arrange and feel confident in the order, the selected poems, let it sit for a few days and tear the whole thing apart. Right now, I’m in the tearing apart phase, the doubt phase, the “it’s not enough” phase. I might never leave that, but at some point I need to get 25 poems together and send it off. I’m feeling sparks of inspiration again. Not for new poems, so much, as I’m starting to open my body and my self to the world again. On the train, walking, breathing – you can see poems, elements of poems if you are open to looking for them. And that’s where I am, that’s a good step out of hibernation – dusting the curtains and opening the windows.
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