This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility by Anna Laura Reeve (Belle Point Press 2023).
First Unbroken Sleep
After four and a half hours of unbroken sleep
I feel like a swan
The ‘trying to conceive’ web forum
recedes into the past, where every missed period
was a cause for dreams
and good lucks were baby dust! with
rotating star gifs.
Good luck wishes in the new mom groups
are sleepy dust.
These women who parted Red Seas to look
into small slate-gray eyes—
on their seventh day they want to sleep.
While for me, filament-thin sprays of milk arc
and lie on my daughter’s eyelids
as I cajole her awake.
Seven weeks in the amusement park,
seven weeks sleeping in the operator’s booth
waking to my baby whining
in her sleep,
my shirt a wet hood
over two fawns’ faces.
Anna Laura Reeve is the author of Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility (Belle Point Press, 2023). Winner of the 2022 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, selected by American poet Jane Hirshfield, Reeve was also a finalist for the Greg Grummer Poetry Contest, the Ron Rash Award, the Heartwood Poetry Prize, and won the 2024 Emerging Writers Award from the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Salamander, Terrain.org, and others. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and lives with her daughter and husband near the Tennessee Overhill region, traditional land of the Eastern Cherokee.
Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.
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