The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

I always had the same feeling when they engulfed me: that I was in disguise as a member of another species. The way they circled and cooed reminded me of pigeons, so that was what they became—a gaggle of birds—and I was a person with feathers stuck to my clothes.

“But we are made of each other. We are parts of the same whole. Don’t you know she grew inside me, like one of my organs?”

She was still covered in a fine layer of my insides, and it struck me that she was like an organ, that I felt about her the way I would have felt if someone had scooped out my heart and put it on top of me.

Missing him was a smoke burn in my middle: a small round hole, black at the edges.

Kids aren’t born loving you. Needing you, maybe. But not loving you. You have to put the work in for love.”

Up close, she smelled darkly of women, of blood and meat and toilets.

When I left the house the next morning the world was made of bright white light and I was made of noise.

I love her down to the dark space around her bones,