Your Body Has Its Own Memory Poem by Leah Browning

After a few days, you know how to navigate
one-handed, how to fold the baby into
the nook of your arm. Nursing, that most natural
and impossible task, becomes second nature.

Mainly, though, you feel the stirrings
of your old and battered heart, pulled shapeless
over the years, webbed and broken, with its
worms of glue plainly visible at the seams;

you hold the child in your arms, and love
pours out of every crack and crevice,

surrounding your baby on all sides, replacing
the warm bath that had come to seem like home,
and forming an invisible shield like the one that you,
only now, are beginning to remember.