Blues by AMANDA Leal

You wake up at 2:00 AM, hungry, the way you did as an infant, when you would claw at my shirt like a blind animal, moving upon the scent of milk beneath fabric, like the smell of humidity before rain. Your face is bathed in blues, the holy light from the television, as though you lay on the bottom of the ocean floor like a relic that I found, my Easter Island head. I feed you mini muffins as your eyes roll back, ear pressed to my femoral artery, and I realize, desperately, that I want to take you everywhere. You have only ever spent one night apart from me, and I cannot imagine next month, as you sleep in your father's apartment, the nights growing longer like a train accelerating in the opposite direction. I wonder if I will awaken automatically to your hunger, even miles away, if my nipples will unfasten and begin their sap run again, whether I will hear you crying, the way I used to hallucinate your newborn cries as I took a shower, as though your need was a bullet that could echo down my spine. You chew with your eyes shut, almost as though you are praying, your features washed with artificial light, the aura it forms over your curls like the sunrise over a corn field. I think of how I will leave muffins beneath your bed at your father's house, a bread crumb trail for you to walk when you need me, as though I could string you right upon the blue vein of your umbilical cord, like the invisible lines of latitude that trace the Earth, down the path that always leads back to me and to us.