1. Breathing Each Other 
Ladies and gentlemen. Sefiya Josephine McAllister.
Three weeks, four pounds, half-asleep and loosely swaddled

in my arms, where, arms flung, she also holds me.
Her feet perched on my potbelly, mine against the floor

push just enough to rock us, eyes, all four,
beginning to droop. We’re breathing each other:

Brand New Day get a whiff of Mr. Worn & Torn.
Wincing at the ceiling light. Too bright, we fuss,

why is it even on? And look, Sef, the Great Ma comes,
comes, a flick, it’s gone, and a gold-powdered Texas dusk,

dark clouds stacked on the horizon—how’s that? she says,
and drapes a gauze burp cloth across our heads.

If the infant makes a mother of the ma, a grandfather
of the ma’s pa, these lines the same: parsed, broken, stacked,

restacked, not to gain, regain, but to member, re-member
inhaling each other’s light—the room darkens,

both of us now asleep, selfless, porcelain—
exhaling each other’s darkness.


2. Waking
One nose, hers, begins to crinkle, one leg
to twitch. Arms struggle against the swaddle. One eye,

mine, half opens. What’s up? Rumble within—the body
must teach itself…to suck, to swallow, breathe,

all the holy stuff, and sometimes, No way, says the body,
whose only book is being itself. Gas, says Ma.

A blast from the furnace of making what is,
almost, finally, be: from milk, more body,

from slurping, words, syntax from burping—
think of it, Annie: the gut’s the forge

where Sefi must wake from dreams of you, a one
with a self. Self, come meet your maker, struck

in the fires of needing to mean. No wonder,
Johnny, the urge is to coo, baby talk, oh baby talk,

it’s lullabies or nothing at the bone.


3. The Mind’s Mouth
Seven weeks. Arms (the size of my thumb) rise up,
tiny hands twist one way, wee-tiny fingers

the other. She’s calling the world to order,
and more or less it comes, again and again:

the Great Ma, the Great Pa, the Great Dark,
and, like a candle that lights itself, consciousness

from the Great Un. It’s maddening, but,
like being a cloud or a giraffe, not altogether unruly:

a soupy core of good must be before we know
we’re not. No, not not, we are! One is! Aflame! A Sefi Jo

of substance, weight, two months now, eight pounds,
and starting to show some chops: social smile, social frown;

greed—she scans me for boobs—and diligence, after a shift
at the trough of Ma, I shall study my bird mobile.

There’s the glitch, I think, slouched on the couch,
scrolling through my Twitter feed: needing to know

which end is up, the glitch by which we grow.
Slowness itself must be beauty. The oak out front

bows down like the sky’s emcee: Child, it says,
I give you the stars—you and your ma— a slowness

that unfolds itself, mistake by mistake.
You root, latch, gurgle-gurgle—ouch cries Ma,

all quiet, more rumbles within, then, farts triumphant,
you shit. Then comes a shriek: first laughter,

and I’m listening with my toes
to the essential explanation of life:

glory of the body, its hungers, delights—Let’s top you off,
says Ma, more chowing…

                                          “in the mind’s eye,” we say,
but really—you, Ma, eyes locked, milk dripping down

your cheek—it’s the mind’s mouth, the mind’s tongue:
to taste the Great Ma, to gum that she is good,

then comes a kind of squeaking, like dolphins,
a moaning, half grunt, half trill.