“The Birth Mother on Her Daughter’s First Birthday” by Sarah Freligh

It’s late and the woman one cell over
is finally quiet. Awake, she’s at war
with life, that motherfucker, fights
sleep when it threatens to take her down
for the night, struggling
and punching the thin sheets
to keep what she imagines is hers.
The guard says it’s snowing—
a real sonofabitch to drive in—
a foot already and more to fall.
On our first date, your father
drove to the KMart parking lot
and carved figure eights in the new snow.
I sat in the passenger’s seat and said
go faster because I liked
how his biceps looked
under his flannel shirt
when he yanked that steering wheel
and made that car obey him.

I should tell you
everyone’s innocent
in here. Guilt is a nametag we wear
for therapy sessions, tear up
and discard on the way out.
We sit in a circle and drink
bitter coffee, tell stories
that scald the tongue.
The day you were born you felt
like a bowl of hot pasta the doctor
spilled on my stomach. The nurse said
your baby is beautiful but she was wrong.
You looked like Eisenhower,
and you were never mine,
just something I might
have borrowed for a while.

–Sarah Freligh,
A Brief Natural History of an American Girl
Accents Publishing

Sarah Freligh is the author of Sort of Gone (Turning Point Books, 2008). Her work has appeared in The Sun, Rattle, Brevity, Barn Owl Review, Cimarron Review, Iowa Woman, Third Coast, Tar River Poetry, and Painted Bride Quarterly and on Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac.” Among her awards are a 2009 poetry fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a poetry grant from the Constance Saltonstall Foundation in 2006, and an Artist’s Exchange grant from the New York State Council for the Arts in 1997. She is a visiting assistant professor of English and creative writing at St. John Fisher College in Rochester, New York.