From the beginning, you needed. And I needed to meet that need in you. That hunger. So I gave you the breast, over and over, thinking how strange that you should feed from this body freshly ripped and sutured. How powerful this instinct, stronger than exhaustion, to keep you alive.

Before the resurrection plague, in our early days of colostrum and delirium, you were not sated. As you lost weight, I too was hollowed. I hovered over the bassinet, helpless, watching your tiny chest rise and fall. Then, at last, milk. And your sighs at the breast made raw nipples endurable, antiseptic spray on my stitched perineum endurable. The pheromones of contentment filled my nose, my blood, and we slept.

I care about my body, my life. You didn’t change this. But this body I care for wants to sustain you. Even now, at the end of the world, when your cry once fierce with the quickness of tiny lungs drags like a heavy thing pulled across wet leaves. Still, the sound sets my teeth grinding, my arms reaching. You sound so lonely, so sad. So hungry.

How I yearn to pick you up in your bloodstained blanket and fill your mouth with my aching breast. Yet I fear the touch of those four tiny teeth. From your birth, my body remembers ripping, a sound and a knowing that no epidural can block. It does not want to rip again. It hesitates, holds me back.

But you cannot go without food. Downstairs, the one that scratched you rots where I left it, skewered and duct taped to a dining room chair, starved to a second death. I could spare you this fate, at least, if I give you the meat you require. I would wake in your world. Carry you down. Help you find more.

When the flesh comes apart, those who give birth naturally feel intense burning, then dive into hormonal bliss. Perhaps this would not be so different. Maybe I can raise the courage, face the pain this time.

I think that it was panic, not pain, that made me scream for drugs when I birthed you. I feared I would lose myself, lose our love in the trauma.

But I’ve learned so much since then. In the months after birth, I discovered I am built to receive nature’s indifference. To subordinate all rest and satiation my body would have needed to recover. I filled your stomach every three hours. I ate and hungered. Then, when the silence from our neighbors’ houses gave way to barking dogs and the wheeze of the infected outside, I learned that trauma, like Dante’s hell, always holds another round. I no longer believe in heaven or God. Yet my love for you endured.

Now we huddle under a slanted roof, alone, breathing the scent of oily smoke. You are crying out in this new way of yours. As I look out the attic window onto charred lawns and unquiet corpses, it seems that all my life I feared the wrong things.

I fear pain. But I dread this milk drying up, my body accepting a loss I never will.

I fear change. But you have already changed me. I am already yours.

I will always feed you, always love you. So take now, child of my womb, seed of my shade.