Galaxias / γαλαξίας
What nobody told me
is that milk sprays.
Supply and demand:
empty vessel cries out for filling,
sends you from zero to
spilling, heavy with
tenderness, begging to be
spent. Squirted my man
in the eye across the room
without even trying. Hooked up to the
pump til I heard its diaphragm
thump incantatory words.
Took the bottles from the
fridge and swirled the fat
into the milk, read my name written
in the curlicues of its rich dissolving
script. I wiped so many scatter
plots of spatters from my laptop that
if you took every droplet and played
connect the dots you’d get
a net, with a spot for
every named or nameless mouth I’ve
ever modified my body’s
code to nourish. Look at them all
shimmering in its
grip like silver minnows:
the little fella asleep in the next room, the
three other babies I fed besides my
own, every kid who ever mistakenly
called me mom or
clung to me
like I was their first and gentlest home.
Sally O’Brien
Sally O'Brien works as a high school teacher in Philadelphia; she lives with her family within earshot of the Market-Frankford Line. Her poems have previously appeared in Duende and Psaltery & Lyre.
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
I mean, maybe because I was pregnant at the time I accepted this. But also like the form is kinda funny to me (in a good way) and I also did laugh out loud at the line "Squirted my man/in the eye across the room/without even trying," so there was this initial sense of just joy that I got from reading this poem. But there's also this really important underlying sense of what the body gives and gives and gives. Not only that but what women are culturally expected to give and give and give. That really resonated with me.
The final lines also just hit man. Like I said I first read this when I was pregnant, and now I’m reading it again with my 8 week old and it continues to move me in different ways each time I read it.