The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility by Anna Laura Reeve

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Sleep Deprivation

Motherhood is putting a sock in it.
Putting a sock on it.
Motherhood is The Great Sock Hunt.

Curtains, pulling them.
Invisible warpaths my feet beat every day
but such little wars.

Motherhood is a visor I can’t take off. 
	Kids’ TV show voice actors squeaking 
		and scrambling, the little 
		ha-has, merciless upward inflections.

Motherhood is a duststorm.
I tie scarves over our mouths and noses,
I yell close the door!
I see motes in the air, regardless.
The inside of my mouth, nose, 
		is dry with fine layers 
			of careful work, 
fast work.

I walk across the yard as my daughter calls me 
	and I know I will stay inside, now, and start dinner.

My head is a balloon
that wants to find its new form 
	in those cumulonimbus up there, 

			oh this sky. How wide it is.
How like an enormous bowl of light and cloud.

But with a hole in the unseeable center— 
	if I loosed myself like a blue balloon 
			I would roll, 
		   find a center, 
	   fall out.

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