Poetry: “Bedtime Aubade” by Emily Adams-Aucoin

Emily Adams-Aucoin’s “Bedtime Aubade,” is brimming with intimacy as we peek into the terror and beauty of new motherhood. There’s something scary about the way that Adams-Aucoin describes the love she feels for her child, but there’s also something magical, the sheer force of human emotion stripped bare and raw and given to us, as readers, in a way that we can easily understand and digest. It’s a rare poem that so easily cuts through the posturing and preening and shows us a glimpse of the most primal and powerful human experiences, the push and pull of currents we don’t entirely understand and yet are still find ourselves blindly at their mercy. The success of this poem, and its brilliance, is in the way Adams-Aucoin masterfully and somehow effortlessly taps into that double-sided coin of joyous, paralyzing, desperate, gracious and glorious fear.

BEDTIME AUBADE
My husband carries our daughter into her room so that I can sleep
alone. They’re critical, these hours, so I can think about something
besides the spaces between her breaths, how they infect me
with their dark potential. She giggles, oblivious of or
content with the growing distance between us, the estuary
we are both rivers to evaporating, that shared space in the One Self
closing while boundaries solidify like separate highways.
Leaving me, my daughter laughs like violins. I watch her halo
of ringlets disappear down the hall. Alone, the hours will stretch
and warp. When I ask the silence what I am without her, it’ll short-
circuit. Before my husband closes her door and together,
they make a covenant with the night, my daughter whips her head
around and addresses me as a prophet addresses a hungry crowd:
If you’re scared, Mommy—
                                                            If you’re scared—
But she doesn’t say what to do next.