Infanticide

When you suffocate the baby
it wakes you up. You go searching
through cabinets for cereal,
unnerved by blue body, its fat cheeks
white under the viselike grip.

After you suffocate the baby,
you hear strangers
talking outside the open window.
You wonder whether the wind
has borne witness to this dream act,
the most honest.

There were avenues to travel, certain
details open to interpretation.
What puzzles you most—the guilelessness
of the eight or nine-month old,
how it went along with the plot,

putting its mouth in your hand,
nuzzling your fingers like a mutt.
On the night you suffocate the infant—
you who never remember your dreams—
the clarity of baby, hand, bassinette

refuses to leave its place
beside the other known quantities:
water, the spit of land blown clean
save for black and white
sand that rushes into clothing

with a vengeance, like carpenter ants
burrowing into a stump
for the sake of the colony,
or the hole in your cheek—
that double.






Click here to listen to Judith Skillman reading "Infanticide"

Judith Skillman’s eleventh collection of poems, Prisoner of the Swifts, was recently released by Ahadada Books. Her current manuscript, The Never, was a finalist for the FIELD/Oberlin Press Award in 2009. Heat Lightning: New and Selected Poems 1986-2006 was published by Silverfish Review Press in 2006. The recipient of an award from the Academy of American Poets for her book Storm (Blue Begonia Press 1998), Skillman has published work in Poetry, FIELD, The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, Midwest Quarterly Review, and Seneca Review, as well as numerous other journals and anthologies. For additional information, visit: judithskillman.com.