Margery Hauser
is a New York City resident whose work has appeared in Little Perversities, Poetica Magazine and other journals, both print and online.
She is a former teacher of French and Humanities and a member of the Parkside Poets Writing Workshop.
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Family Story
The boy came into the flickering light
blue-gray, shrouded in blood and mucus,
womb-smothered, she believed, by the laundry basket
she’d braced against hip and belly as she trudged
from sink to wringer to clothesline:
born dead.
The girl was puny but alive,
so small she seemed a minnow
washed ashore from an amniotic sea,
gasping and shivering.
The mother sat by the fireplace
soaking scraps of cloth with milk
squeezed drop by drop from her breasts.
She wrung the fluid into the infant’s mouth,
gently massaging the throat to coax a swallow
from this creature too weak to suckle.
The tiny hand grasped the mother’s thumb
and they both
breathed.
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