Meditation on a broken child, var. 2

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Jeneva Stone is the mother of two children, one with multiple disabilities. Her work has appeared online in The New Hampshire Review and Beltway Poetry Quarterly, as well as in many print journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Cimarron Review, and Poet Lore. Her website, Busily Seeking . . . Continual Change, discusses motherhood and poetry.

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Days when clouds are a lid on the vulgarity of inhabited spaces
          at times obscenity becomes an operator's manual
          wonder where I last set love down to cool it off

and the lid is sometimes lifted but jubilation is gone along with its gestures
          its brash smashed face and arms bright with blood
          punished by an optimistic joyride into the unknown

then other families affront me like a breast on whose nipple I may not suck
          the world's cervix constricts around a neck half-out
          as motherhood reverses its fleshy gears to decompose

rejection a solid form like plexiglass along an interminable countertop
          separating the broken from the well-oiled functional
          everyday models of neurologic competence and vivacity

days on the outside of reality facing in toward a moment not mine
          measuring loss against the burlap of turned backs
          and shredded ribbons of words I would never say --

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