When my daughter was 5 months old, she was hospitalized for a week after an accident. To this day, it remains one of the most traumatic experiences of my life even though her recovery was swift and full. The days in the hospital began to run together. In the dim artificial light of that hospital room, every other person receded from the perimeter of my conscious care. A lot of my writing revolves around parents and children and how their lived realities may occupy the same linear passage of time, but are so often markedly different in experience and perception. No doubt this will be the case for me and my daughter, especially as she grows older. However, that one week in the hospital was like the nucleus of early motherhood for me: isolated, solitary, and in absolute and intentional communion with my baby. Nothing and no one else mattered. This is a poem about that time and that feeling.
Thanks to Broad! journal for publishing it in 2014.
