Two Poems by Kendra DeColo

I Pump Milk like a Boss

I pump milk on the side of the road where the grass is biblical green
as if first cousin to the cow, her pink and swollen tits immaculate

as the plumbing of a church organ sending up calls to god, brassy mesh
of notes, fermented and dank as kush. I pump milk with my bare hands

into a bar’s bathroom sink, above which is a mirror where someone’s scrawled
I Love Cricket Pussy and below that, Everyone Deserves to be Loved.

I look at myself under the fingered smudge, the bodily fluids spattered
like haikus and I pump as if my milk is propaganda,

fingers bowing across my chest like a pawn shop violin,
milky graffiti tagging the spit-clogged drain.

I pump like I’m writing my name in blood
which turns to the milk my child sucks dry, which she turns into blood.

I pump like I have a tattoo on my pudenda
that says Aerosmith backwards, I pump

as if my hands have teeth, one combat boot hitched up on the toilet seat,
each hiss of milk chanting like a choir yes bitch yes,

my tits bitten and salt-veined, as when my baby
took her first gulp of air, humming   

from the engorged crevasse of me
like a herd of wildebeest, as if the hive of me could have burst,

the infrared honey, the glop glop
of afterbirth dripping down my left leg,

spittle and amen, amniotic residue
fluorescent with prayer—

Do men lactate is a popular google search and I wonder
what would happen if they could, our presidents

lifting their offspring to their breasts in the deep pockets
of night, listening to the dribble of milk

sipped from the pulpit of their bodies. Tonight my breasts
became so engorged I said I’d pay someone to suck my tits

half-joking. But a woman who heard followed me to the bathroom, read me
a sex poem while I pumped my milk, leaning away from the need in her voice

and the milk came slow and I pumped and waited for her to finish
and a street light scribbled in the parking lot

and I know there is a price we pay for loneliness
and a price we pay to forget it and I dedicate my libido

to my younger self and this is how I want to live, milk-stained, a little bit emptied,
a little bit in love with the abundance of my body,

my milk pale yellow with a layer of cream
which I will save long after it’s turned, praising its curdled glow

every time I open the fridge, as if its presence is enough to keep me safe,
as if it’s enough to make me invincible.

I Write Poems About Motherhood

Tonight I can write the most motherly lines,
for example: it’s true, my asshole will never be the same  

after giving birth, not its shape, but its soul, small wick
of shadow I once called home and dream. Tonight

I can write how it burned like a votive, the whole
inverted star a series of grievances from which another

self grew, séance and seam, split off
to live parallel lives like vaporish twins. I can write

that I gave birth and died and came back to life
and my asshole will never be the same. It wore

a haunted look those first few weeks. Claimed
it needed to “take fresh airs” in the country, wore

aggressively Victorian clothes and strutted
around naming geodes like a gentlemen

farmer. Shut up, asshole, I admonished. Tonight I write
my daughter emerged and split me into two selves. It did not hurt

the way they said it would. I rocked on my knees
singing a song like hurtling my voice off a cliff.

My husband’s hand disappeared into mine
and for a moment I left this world, a hem of blood

between us. I broke onto the shore of a fixed
note. I helixed and drank the urine of starved

apparitions to keep me afloat, slapped the shit
out of my reflection, squatted and squeezed

a rocky planet out from the blue horizon
like a ship bifurcating a labial sky. But my asshole,

to whom I must now give credit where credit is due,
taught me how to anchor to the earth, locate the hot center

which I always knew was there but never saw
shining in my sacrum like Orion’s belt

when they stitched me shut in a ragged,
casual way, even though I wished

to stay open a little longer,
unhinged and full of silences. Tonight I can write

that I would give birth a million times
over and not tell anyone about it

if I could feel that kind of way again:
one hollowed self opened wide

enough to swallow my own body
then spit it back out onto the earth.

Kendra DeColo is the author of My Dinner with Ron Jeremy (Third Man Books, 2016) and Thieves in the Afterlife (Saturnalia Books, 2014), selected by Yusef Komunyakaa for the 2013 Saturnalia Books Poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter, Bitch Magazine, VIDA, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She has received awards and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, the Millay Colony, and the Tennessee Arts Commission. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.