Warm and soft. I\u2019m inside the warm and soft. Mother\u2019s hand is moving over me in smooth after smooth. It\u2019s a round feeling. It\u2019s a yawn of falling inside. Mother\u2019s hand has a rhythm like rocking. I don\u2019t know what goes up and down and what presses, only it\u2019s warm. Mother makes a breeze in my nose. The breeze is sweet and heavy. I want more. I want it, but it comes and goes, like her hand. All of this is to say I remember how mother untied my bonnet, stroked my hair, how she tucked a lavender heart pillow where I lay my head. Only later could I say, This happened. Only after we cut long stalks, tied them to rafters to dry upside-down, crushed flowers from stems with a rolling pin to fill sachets with the scent of sleeping. One day, stitching lace to heart\u2019s rim, I had a moment of Oh!: mother\u2019s touch, the lull and lure of drowse, me so little in the cradle I couldn\u2019t know the strange smell\u2019s source. And if I saw something as a baby, it was the same as the singing inside. And if I heard singing, it was as one hears in a dream, a song from faraway, a surge of tides, warm water washing the dreamer the way dusk dims the purple gardens glazing the hills. Mother, lover: lave-moi comme les fleurs ont lav\u00e9 mes sens. Teach me to bathe in such beauty\u2014
\n
<\/p>\n
Gillian Cummings<\/strong>‘ poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boulevard, Colorado Review, The Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, Front Porch Journal, PANK<\/em> and other journals. Her chapbook, Spirits of the Humid Cloud<\/em>, was released last August by dancing girl press. She currently teaches poetry workshops at a hospital and is also a visual artist.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Warm and soft. I\u2019m inside the warm and soft. Mother\u2019s hand is moving over me in smooth after smooth. It\u2019s a round feeling. It\u2019s a yawn of falling inside. Mother\u2019s hand has a rhythm like rocking. I don\u2019t know what<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":384,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9926],"tags":[22046],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/384"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=696"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1925,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/696\/revisions\/1925"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=696"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=696"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/libblogs.luc.edu\/requited\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=696"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}