I sleep naked, not for pleasure
but convenience, breasts seeping
onto the sheets. I pump in the dark
as my husband snores. We whisper
through dinner, a glass of wine, fuck
in the black, like my mother is in
the next room and we are just teenagers,
new to each other, my body undiscovered
in this foreign state and now
my days are just coffee and cake
and first time mums hiding their greys,
boasting their little one’s sleeping through.
I’m crying in the bathroom again.
I’m lying awake as the white noise plays,
And I wanted this. I wanted this.
I check his chest, feel it rise and fall. Feel 
my naked stomach sag, how it hangs
from me like fruit on the vine.
He came a week early, sped up by a drip
And there was no doula, no breathing through,
Just cables and beeping and needles and blood.
I’ll never forget how he tumbled from me,
a cord that seemed to keep on coming
like a phone wire stretched up the stairs.

From Swell (see review); first published in The Rialto
Maria Ferguson is a writer and performer who lives in Leeds. She is widely published and anthologised, and Swell is her second collection.
Poetry submissions to [email protected]