the air burns sweet in our afternoon
bed the stain and stink of feeding this
tiny vomiting human this small
pale for a window too brief biter
of whatever’s before him and he
swings the plastic turtle in an arc
violent and blind and unconcerned he
hits his mother’s face it’s not his will
hitting his own meek nose with a squid
smuggled in his fist from the bathtub
to bed us three together our love
menagerie horizontal here
in the splash zone of his personing
here in the sickly nest we’ve laundered
not recently enough what we put
inside our son is still spilling forth
in gloppy white streams this fermented
bile cheese drips from his unconcerned chin
into the bed we made him in now
sexual as a bird autopsy
we are pinned here beneath beside him
our son grand and leaking our son grown
clutching and heat-hungry between us