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Milk

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At first, god kept my milk from me.

My son gummed at the hard breast.

 

The ceiling had rivulets of mold.

We put a bucket in the dead dog’s

 

spot, and water dripped where he

once slept. We should have been

 

given nothing: no animal, no life.

A song kept humming in the wall.

 

I don’t hear it, you said. I must have

heard the thud of the overdue bills

 

falling through the slot, the train

rumbling through our bedroom, our

 

neighbor’s groan of ecstasy, oom-pah-

pah of conjunto between each breath.

 

Our son came early, eyes shiny from

elsewhere. He emptied the whole breast

 

and one night something skittered

over the dried milk on my nipple

 

like god passing, like the dead with

their stick hands, crawling back

 

to the first mother, until I saw

the giant cockroach, and when I

 

screamed and stood naked, you

grabbed the metal bar ready to fight,

 

ready to kill. My milk had become

bountiful, it leaked from me sweetly,

 

set my son into the deepest sleep,

beckoned the animals, even the ugliest,

 

even the scorned: the ones we

are told will inherit the earth.

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Jessica Cuello’s newest book, Feral, is forthcoming from JackLeg Press in 2027. Her book Liar was selected by Dorianne Laux for The 2020 Barrow Street Book Prize. Cuello is the recipient of a 2023 NYSCA Artist Grant, a 2025 Saltonstall Fellowship and is poetry editor at Tahoma Literary Review. She is a public school teacher in Central NY.

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