The First Leaf

I thought I forgave you. Then I took root and became

someone’s mother. This unending dread, ever checking

for his breath. I have never wanted to be less like you

than I do now, daily gauging the venom,

how much of you blights my blood. When my baby wails, I ask

whether I too could beat his body quiet. And when I choose

to be a mother, choose to be tender to my child—a choice

my mangled brain makes each day—my fury surges.

The distance between him alive and him dead

is how well I am. And I think about the woman in the news

who poured water on her sleeping baby’s face. And I

think how for decades, I was grateful you never killed me. How

that was enough to make me think you loved me.

I raged as a child, but never

in the right direction. So when my therapist said

that not killing me yet didn’t mean not killing me ever—

that if I had stayed, I would have died—I had to

watch her get angry to know to get angry.

On the eighth week of the pandemic, my son, whom I sheltered

at home for all that time, found on our fifth-floor balcony

a tiny green leaf the width of his pinky.

The last time we’d strolled outside, the city was frigid. Frost

everywhere we looked. And Dad, let me tell you, the leaf

stunned us both. Unexpected, like the olive branch

snatched by the dove barreling back to the ark.

He refused to let go—the first leaf of all the leaves

my child will ever hold. He looks so much like his father.

Nothing at all like us.