Albatross
NaPoWriMo Day 29: Today I'm repurposing a not-super-old poem that's been tugging at my brain lately. It felt good to tighten it up.
NaPoWriMo Prompt 29: If you’ve been paying attention to pop-music news over the past couple of weeks, you may know that Taylor Swift has released a new double album titled “The Tortured Poets Department.” In recognition of this occasion, Merriam-Webster put together a list of ten words from Taylor Swift songs. We hope you don’t find this too torturous yourself, but we’d like to challenge you to select one these words, and write a poem that uses the word as its title.
[The ten words are: clandestine, Machiavellian, incandescent, altruism, self-effacing, albatross, antithetical, mercurial, elegy, and cardigan.]
The original poem (published as “The wound”) is here.
I never liked my breasts. They were the true
albatross, the weight that kept me from running.
They were foundries where iron beams were made.
I wanted to float like a feather of a woman
but I was the whole bird instead, earth-bound hen.
Breastfeeding didn’t come easy.
My first baby tried to latch, tried to live
with what I couldn’t give her.
She stopped crying when we offered formula
and as my body knit itself back together
her dad and grandparents fed her.
For my next baby, I fought with a different weapon:
a little electric pump, the best we could afford.
I told my breasts that they would do their damn job
and pumped. I looked down at one point
and half of the bottle was filled with blood.
During my fourth pregnancy, I found a lump
buried deep inside my left breast
an ache that sung like a sore tooth.
I was passed from specialist to specialist
and the abscesses grew, bubbling like stew
breaking and weeping vials of milk.
I had never loved my breasts,
but now that they seemed so close to lost
I didn’t want to lose them.
I stood on the prow of my sinking ship
calling, Come back, albatross. Swerve back.
what an amazing poem. I felt those words
The second work of yours that I’ve read, and you really don’t disappoint. “and the abscesses grew, bubbling like stew”—that’s my favorite line here, how lyrical and viscerally descriptive!