Kalee Schwarting

poetry

Photo by abhijeet gourav

Discharge

I laid you on my right side
And saw the picture of a bald, white baby in a crib 
printed on the back of an ambulance, and the back of my eyelids
“Alone, Back, Crib,” it says, proclaiming your imminent demise 
when I fall asleep nursing you in the bed

“A wound the size of a dinner plate” the nurse said. 
“Skin to skin” the people in scrubs kept repeating, rubbing a palm on their upper chest.
“Alone, Back, Crib,” the ambulance announces, in primary colors.

Are you breathing? Is that wheezing? Is that normal?

Milk made from blood filled with too much cortisol or tylenol in my bloodstream
The fear that any mistake, like a teratogen, will pervade for years

Worrying becomes the toxin,
Not the swaddle or the bottle or the bedsharing

“Keep me with you or I’ll die,” you screamed
With the force of a thousand of generations of carry mammals

I am not ready to be off your body

Do I believe you or the back of the ambulance?

The sheets stained with milk and blood and snot and tears and smears of yellow poop and your father went to sleep upstairs because he couldn’t handle the crying and the bed needs to be stripped and washed and I can barely walk. I lay a towel over it, and back down.

Sleep when the baby sleeps, they also say

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Keep Away From Children (1/25/2025)

Printed in black and yellow on plastic bag of potting soil I bought from the big box store
Gloves recommended wash hands afterwards

It’s dirt I think inanely. Dirt is for children and children are for dirt & if it’s not dirt
then what is it in my bag?

It’s just there for liability, I tell myself, just like the plastic plant stake that said 
“not for human or animal consumption” right under the soil line
right under the more boldly advertised “great for pollinators!” 
on two lavender plants I put in last spring.

I was mad enough about that one I Karen emailed 
all the way to corporate, to figure out what they’d been treated with
If they’d given the nursery workers in Canada where they came from cancer
if they’d kill the bees and wasps in my front yard. If they’d kill me, if I made tea

Got three different non-answers including a manager
that tried to convince me that Lavandula angustifolia isn’t edible (it is).

Just for liability, as whatever is in the bag gets all under my nails as I pack it down 
around the spider plant pups I’m gifting to my husband’s co-workers

Some spills on my daughter’s round fist, on her dirty sweatshirt sleeve printed with hearts, stained with juice and cereal milk while she’s pulling at the side of the bag and I feel a stab of worry. Should I wipe it off? Should I put her in a bath? Is anything safe anymore?

My inside grip on something brittle slips and the tears aren’t about unknown caustic fertilizers in the soil anymore, they’re for Renee Good’s orphaned 6-year-old, for their family charter school shut down by threats

for a 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos in a blue bunny hat
Was there juice on his sleeves? 
Is he with his dad, in the detention center? 
Are his lawyers getting non-answers from three different agencies? Where’s their gofundme?

The news outlets are talking about Alex Prietti now, and they should, they should but none of them are telling me if the six kids that got tear gassed in their van all made it home safe, all I know is they had to do CPR on the baby. Until someone tells me different it feels like they’re stuck there forever, still strapped in their car seats.

What’s left? if coming home safe in your spiderman backpack isn’t for children anymore

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3rd Revised & Updated Edition

My sophomore year of college, Cynthia Mazurall at the Wellness Center handed me a paperback copy of "Healing the Child Within." There was a disquieting drawing of a fetus superimposed over a navy-blue, weeping figure on the cover. Her potted cactus in the corner looked a little dry.

"I'm not a baby," I sulked, fragile in my newfound freedom, and put it back on her shelf.
Everyone knows that it's a bad thing, to be a baby.

I'd carried two of my own before I came back to the idea
An artificial voice reading me human development textbooks while I nursed my firstborn
Learning from the swollen, bewildered empathy of a new mother

At the base of my brain an acquaintance began to reform. My professor says “our nervous system grows not up like a ruler, but like the rings of a tree”

When I'm still I can feel her 
Beating softly inside me 
Flickering sometimes like fire, swaying sometimes in a motion as old as the form of the seas.

She is there in the powerful draw of human faces, the need to meet eyes 
to be held tight & still, in sincere and frequent sleepiness

I wish we’d been introduced sooner, or more eloquently
With better font & graphic design 
In my mind I hold her tenderly. None of it was her fault

Kalee Schwarting is a writer, a therapist and a mom. She writes poetry & fiction when she isn’t parenting or seeing clients at her clinical practice. She copes daily with a severe case of justice sensitivity and isn’t sure what makes writing harder, executive dysfunction or kids. Kalee lives in Idaho with her husband, who is also a writer, her young children, who are also passionate about fairness, and her two dogs, Sage and Ellie.

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a literary journal for work that nourishes and lingers

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