Morning Song
Hannah Baker Saltmarsh
Amber-jo roping the goat to the milking stand—insisting on the anklet
jewelry-tether like the female’s auction-block nudity, barbaric
inspections of naked breasts, pre-sale, pre-lacerated shoulder blades,
but no one wants to think of the dead slave women here,
before coffee, among the animals, on Virginia farms that might have
been a plantation, that is still a grave. Amber-jo pulls the goat
teats into the pre-dawn of literacy, the breast as symbol,
her own breasts her baby’s first hint that a language exists to
shape our want, before a baby knows letters and Ticonderoga
pencil-eraser nubs with the peacock-green ringed stick.
The nipples in Playboy look like a bouquet of pencil erasers,
with differing degrees of graphite smears, shades of dusty rose.
Is this where words come from, the demand for milk?
Amber-jo expressed the goat’s milk in that hour of dark
to the half-fog of six-o-clock light—the time doors flung open
in the transitions, the in-between portal where there’s no
day almost, no talking yet arising from anywhere, the boredom
like a child’s punishment forcing you to read or to journal.
It was in the barn with this animal mother where she’d remember
her students’ faces, why they came thirsty to write, why she
wrote, too. There was the city too dangerous to play in,
a toddler murdered by a bullet that went through her in the arms
of the babysitter, the intended target, so there was the sci-fi,
fantasy novelist at a young age, retreating to the library where
he knew someone who let him pull the jacket covers off the books,
the extras, to write a different story of his own for these blurbs
that said the writing was illuminating. The chic with the headphones
on all the time was always that way, turning so inward, she
press-squiggled some veins writing across her hand, and it felt
good, shifting the skin, tendons, veins, what’s inside. Maybe why
she pierced her own eyebrow with a safety pin in class the spring
of her senior year, got expelled. Or the closeted teenager who left Dixie cups
of toothpaste, Bromide, vinegar, and raspberry spread for his mother
to find near the sink as he sought to make the world one homogenous
mixture he could look less odd in, he liked the raw materials of writing:
bursting open ballpoint ink sticks until a thimble enough of ink fills
to soak up with an owl feather from off the sidewalk at the zoo,
the perfect straw out of which he’d have a wet quill pen.
There was the free-write about whether writing frees us,
a privilege the enslaved didn’t have, and the term
literacy autobiography. Douglass, who we forget was a child,
hiding the duration of Aunt Hester’s beating and thinking Am I next?,
saw that the path from slave to man existed at all when he heard his master,
most likely also his father, telling the silly wife coifed like a Valentine’s doily,
Windex-ed like gold in a pig’s snout, not to teach Douglass his letters: not to yield
the mile that the slave turns into an ell, the inch billowing
like an accordion into a yard, or melting blackberries into a pulpy ink.
But she had to stop her morning quiet time:
she had to stop pumping the goat’s milk, and mumbling
all the profound, scattered reasons she forgot to tell
her old poetry student when he asked, Why do we have to learn poetry?
Or, where are the words that matter most hiding? Whether the words for our
tombstones, high as ivory leather seats in board rooms, what a canvas,
are as important as the ones engraved over doors, inside
rings, inside cards, on the caption-margin of Poloroids,
along door frames with the ticks for the kids’ heights.
The words we tell our children after their impossible questions.
Amber-jo could see that one student didn’t need poetry until
he had his own child. He had a tall daughter who read chapter books
inside the cove of her fake-wood school desk,
where she also stored a potato bug and caterpillar family she said was mixed like her,
and he needed to work out a different simile with her that didn’t
involve cross-breeds, having absorbed what Natasha Tretheway was dealing
with in calling her father out for calling her his cross-breed child.
If the student wanted to not just read her poems on podcasts, but hear her speak,
or ask her a question after the reading, he could google her now and learn
that her father just died, his words only mattering
because she used them in a poem for her own purposes, the US Poet Laureate
reading at The Folger, making him Shakespeare-eternal and all that hullabaloo.
But Amber-jo’s five-am outing to the barn had to stop
when the task interfered with her own milk supply, her own breasts hard,
cresting up out of her, the pins and needles of let-down, the bluish milk
staining through her off-white midriff. When she ordered
the goats, I almost asked, From Amazon?, she got an extra
one. Those males trimmed through blight in a few weeks,
chewing vines, weeds, different grasses, at a rate of an acre
a month, even miniature pygmies like Gardner, the horns hooked back
like elbows, like the child’s arm slung back, resting on the head,
the way they devour acres of thought. She can’t tell embracing the dense,
wooded mess from making it vanish.
jewelry-tether like the female’s auction-block nudity, barbaric
inspections of naked breasts, pre-sale, pre-lacerated shoulder blades,
but no one wants to think of the dead slave women here,
before coffee, among the animals, on Virginia farms that might have
been a plantation, that is still a grave. Amber-jo pulls the goat
teats into the pre-dawn of literacy, the breast as symbol,
her own breasts her baby’s first hint that a language exists to
shape our want, before a baby knows letters and Ticonderoga
pencil-eraser nubs with the peacock-green ringed stick.
The nipples in Playboy look like a bouquet of pencil erasers,
with differing degrees of graphite smears, shades of dusty rose.
Is this where words come from, the demand for milk?
Amber-jo expressed the goat’s milk in that hour of dark
to the half-fog of six-o-clock light—the time doors flung open
in the transitions, the in-between portal where there’s no
day almost, no talking yet arising from anywhere, the boredom
like a child’s punishment forcing you to read or to journal.
It was in the barn with this animal mother where she’d remember
her students’ faces, why they came thirsty to write, why she
wrote, too. There was the city too dangerous to play in,
a toddler murdered by a bullet that went through her in the arms
of the babysitter, the intended target, so there was the sci-fi,
fantasy novelist at a young age, retreating to the library where
he knew someone who let him pull the jacket covers off the books,
the extras, to write a different story of his own for these blurbs
that said the writing was illuminating. The chic with the headphones
on all the time was always that way, turning so inward, she
press-squiggled some veins writing across her hand, and it felt
good, shifting the skin, tendons, veins, what’s inside. Maybe why
she pierced her own eyebrow with a safety pin in class the spring
of her senior year, got expelled. Or the closeted teenager who left Dixie cups
of toothpaste, Bromide, vinegar, and raspberry spread for his mother
to find near the sink as he sought to make the world one homogenous
mixture he could look less odd in, he liked the raw materials of writing:
bursting open ballpoint ink sticks until a thimble enough of ink fills
to soak up with an owl feather from off the sidewalk at the zoo,
the perfect straw out of which he’d have a wet quill pen.
There was the free-write about whether writing frees us,
a privilege the enslaved didn’t have, and the term
literacy autobiography. Douglass, who we forget was a child,
hiding the duration of Aunt Hester’s beating and thinking Am I next?,
saw that the path from slave to man existed at all when he heard his master,
most likely also his father, telling the silly wife coifed like a Valentine’s doily,
Windex-ed like gold in a pig’s snout, not to teach Douglass his letters: not to yield
the mile that the slave turns into an ell, the inch billowing
like an accordion into a yard, or melting blackberries into a pulpy ink.
But she had to stop her morning quiet time:
she had to stop pumping the goat’s milk, and mumbling
all the profound, scattered reasons she forgot to tell
her old poetry student when he asked, Why do we have to learn poetry?
Or, where are the words that matter most hiding? Whether the words for our
tombstones, high as ivory leather seats in board rooms, what a canvas,
are as important as the ones engraved over doors, inside
rings, inside cards, on the caption-margin of Poloroids,
along door frames with the ticks for the kids’ heights.
The words we tell our children after their impossible questions.
Amber-jo could see that one student didn’t need poetry until
he had his own child. He had a tall daughter who read chapter books
inside the cove of her fake-wood school desk,
where she also stored a potato bug and caterpillar family she said was mixed like her,
and he needed to work out a different simile with her that didn’t
involve cross-breeds, having absorbed what Natasha Tretheway was dealing
with in calling her father out for calling her his cross-breed child.
If the student wanted to not just read her poems on podcasts, but hear her speak,
or ask her a question after the reading, he could google her now and learn
that her father just died, his words only mattering
because she used them in a poem for her own purposes, the US Poet Laureate
reading at The Folger, making him Shakespeare-eternal and all that hullabaloo.
But Amber-jo’s five-am outing to the barn had to stop
when the task interfered with her own milk supply, her own breasts hard,
cresting up out of her, the pins and needles of let-down, the bluish milk
staining through her off-white midriff. When she ordered
the goats, I almost asked, From Amazon?, she got an extra
one. Those males trimmed through blight in a few weeks,
chewing vines, weeds, different grasses, at a rate of an acre
a month, even miniature pygmies like Gardner, the horns hooked back
like elbows, like the child’s arm slung back, resting on the head,
the way they devour acres of thought. She can’t tell embracing the dense,
wooded mess from making it vanish.
Listen to Hannah read the poem here:
Working notes
The poem ultimately comes from my own reflections about breastfeeding my two children. The piece seeks to bring together animal mothers, human mothers, literary mothers (references to Plath and Tretheway as foresisters), and psychoanalytic readings about motherhood and language development. It is an ars poetica that brings together various literacy narratives alongside a breastfeeding mother on maternity leave, and daydreaming about her students and their reasons for reading and writing. From a feminist perspective, the poem attempts to celebrate breastfeeding and the art of poetry as wellsprings of inspiration for the mother-narrator. The poem more broadly addresses issues of feminist and racial identity, asking what silence our writing must break and what other barriers it must free us from.
About the author
Hannah Baker Saltmarsh has published in The New Republic, The Yale Review, The Antioch Review, The Denver Quarterly, The Times Literary Supplement, Gulf Coast, and other journals. She holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of York (UK) and an MFA in Creative Writing from the University or Maryland. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Dillard University and lives with her family in New Orleans.