by Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor

I let it suckle from breasts until my nipples bled. I shared dreams with it, cut herbs from my garden and made it pesto. When it clawed like a restless poem, I told it to giddyup. I locked it in its room. I overfed it, then put it on the scale and expected it to have lost weight. I growled goooooooo so its vowel could crush in the flood of me or scurry up a tree. Like a beggar in a wealthy country, I held out my hand.  I had no time but I gave it 1,440 minutes a day. 

Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor, University of Georgia Meigs Professor of Education, is the author of The Creative Ethnographer’s Notebook, Imperfect Tense (poems) and five other books on the arts of language and education. Recipient of numerous NEA Big Read Grants, a NEA Distinguished Fellowship, Hambidge Residency Award, and the Beckman award, her poems, translations, and creative nonfiction have appeared in Georgia Review, Bitter Southerner, Lilith, Poet Lore, Rattle, American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Hadassah, Plume and elsewhere.