What Issues from a Twilight Sleep (c. 1959)
Come lie back now, breathe deep and take the gas—
It’s just your water breaking, not your bones.
You women you you never think to ask
What consequence this labor of new souls.
A prick in the veins, a black rubber mouth
A quick whiff of stars and oblivion;
Come again, come again, come now, I shout—
Remake me in this awful rendering.
You doctors you, you white and lovely men
Who so patiently minister laughter,
Be so kind to wash the blood, stitch the skin
Ripped to the bone by memory’s daughter.
He slipped a violet fish into my hands
I woke from death, and then the pain began.
S. P. Henry Jr. is an aspiring author and accidental poet (turns out a major character in one of her novels wrote sonnets during the 1950s), who began penning the “little songs” in earnest during the pandemic, finding in their formal restraints a liberating capacity for emotion and thought, lyricism and an almost legal argument for love. As a graduate of Antioch’s MFA creative writing program and a former Lunch Ticket editor, she is proud to have her first sonnet published in Amuse-Bouche.
