Free That Said by Jane Shore Page A

milk.
Face after face,
smiling obedient soldiers,
march in even rows
in the cold glass case.

Postpartum, Honolulu
Before she was born,
I was a woman who slept
through the night, who could live
with certain thoughts without collapsing...
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if my husband died,
I could remarry; if I lost
my job, I could relocate,
start afresh...
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I could live through “anything.”
Even my daughter arriving
four weeks early,
a smile stitching my raw abdomen, hurting
as if I’d been cut in half.
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When they brought her to me
for the first time, her rosiness
astonished me, she
who had been so long in the dark:
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now swathed in an absurd cap and a blanket
washed, rewashed, folded precisely as origami;
a diaper fan-folded to accommodate
her tiny body, a long-sleeved undershirt
with the cuffs folded over her perfect hands,
making them stumps.
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In my private room
filled with expensive gift bouquets,
the stalk-necked bird of paradise flowers,
blind under their spiky crowns of petals,
gawked at me, and the anthurium’s
single heart-shaped blood-red leaf
dangled a skinny penis.
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The next morning, they wheeled me to the nursery.
Behind the glass window,
the newborns were displayed, each
in its own clear plastic Isolette.
A few lay in separate cribs, under heat lamps,
and among them, mine,
born thirty days early, scrawny, naked, her skin tinged
orange with jaundice.
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Under the ultraviolet lamps, her eyes taped shut,
like a person in a censored photograph,
a strip of tape slapped over her genitalia,
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a prisoner, anonymous, in pain—
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my daughter, one day old, without a name,
splayed naked under the lamps,
soaking up the light of this world,
a sad sunbather stretched out on Waikiki.

The Bad Mother
When we play our game, Emma
always saves the best roles for herself:
the Princess, the Mermaid, Cinderella.
Pushing her toy broom around the kitchen,
she’ll put up with the dust and the suffering.
She knows she’ll be rewarded in the end.
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We act out one of her favorite scenes,
where the wicked stepsisters
tear Cinderella’s gown to shreds—
the dress she’s about to wear to the ball,
the dress sewn from scraps
of her own dear dead mother’s clothes.
While I rip the invisible lace,
Emma flings herself to the floor, sobbing
until I, her Fairy Godmother, show up
and spoil her with a coach and a chauffeur,
and a ball gown tiered like a wedding cake.
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I’ve expanded my repertoire.
I’m Snow White’s vain stepmother
disguised as a pimpled crone,
a traveling saleswoman
knocking on the Seven Dwarfs’ door,
selling Snow White—no, giving away for free—
my entire inventory of poison bodices, apples, combs,
to a heroine who gets instant amnesia
every time evil is about to strike.
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I’m the Thirteenth Fairy
who makes Sleeping Beauty
prick her finger on a spindle
and fall into Adolescence’s deep sleep
from which she’ll awaken,
years later as I did, as a mother.
Over and over, I watch my daughter
fall into a faint, and die.
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“Rapunzel, Rapunzel,” I call from below,
eye level with the hem of the dust ruffle,
“let down your hair!”
And Emma solemnly flips her long beige braids
over the edge of the bed—wearing
a pair of my pantyhose on her head, like a wig.
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The nylon feet softly brush the floor.
Now I am witch, now prince, now witch
climbing the pale ladder of Rapunzel’s hair.
Pretending my fingers are scissors,
I lop off her braids, cutting off
the source of my daughter’s power,
her means of escape, her route
to loving someone other than me.
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Once, I played the heroine,
now look what I’ve become.
I am the one who orders my starving child
out of my house and into the gloomy woods,
my resourceful child, who fills her pockets
with handfuls of crumbs or stones
and wanders into a witch’s candy cottage.
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I am the one who sends my Vassilissa on an errand
from which it’s doubtful