Poem in Which My Husband Deploys and Our Baby and I Move Back In with My Parents

of dark pines shivers. A county over

the Cahaba lilies are setting

the river on fire, and I

am thirty and home with an infant,

alone. At the hospital,

Tabitha, the receptionist, says Girl,

how are you? And I

am seeing the breast specialist

about an abscess, a hole

the size of a baby’s fist

and festering. There’s Daisy

the ultrasound tech who touches me

with such tenderness

I almost forget how popular she was,

white teeth, tan legs.

in front of the mammogram machine,

and this life, this life

is folding me in half.