The Adroit Journal- Spring 2011

new to it all.

On the phone he talks of making me the next one.

I tell him I’m not sure now.

I was young and stupid. My pillow once soaked with possibility, though maybe now again, with every dream I have there.

Still, he keeps saying he can move and he can move and he can move here. He has to sell, his soso recent ex living in the house he can't quite say is not his own yet.

I'm better with words. He says this.

He uses the word maybe.

I think of what's inside me. My son, all those decades ago. He is states away living with his dad, in a new family with toddlers.

"I like to plan," he tells me. "I don't want to hurt your feelings or anything."

“Of course,” I said. “I know.”

There was me, then, with my son, in his newborn skin.

How he didn’t know how to coo yet. How, as he cried, I cradled and rocked.