Night terrors woke my baby son.
We let him lie between us, but he refused to sleep.
So I put him back, and resumed crying.
Pinwheel would be a great word
if it wasn’t so close to pinworm.
If pinwheels stop, everything slides to a halt.
The crying carried out over our garden.
We called it our convent garden, beautiful,
spiritual, chaste, pure, and isolated.
That night I dreamed of a huge black rat,
bigger than a jackrabbit, with pinwheels
for eyes, staring at me, telling me something.
What I heard wasn’t crying, but screaming,
from a nest of baby birds in the garden.
We are hungry, hungry, hungry, they wailed.
Another time, I dreamed of a party, women
in a group around me, one of them tried
to pull a mouse from my mouth by the tail.
My son woke crying, so I fed and rocked him,
When I set him down, he cried. Waiting for a baby
to stop crying is like waiting for something to die.
Luanne Castle has published four award-winning poetry collections and has been awarded nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. It has been published in Copper Nickel, Verse Daily, Saranac Review, American Journal of Poetry, The Ekphrastic Review, Thimble, The Mackinaw, One Art, Lothlorien, and many other journals and anthologies.
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