Breastfeeding
by Fiona Benson
i
But really it’s like this –
weeping as your milk comes in,
clutching a hot poultice
and counting through the pain
as you bring her on
to the hardened breast.
There’s a whole new grammar
of tongue-tie and latch –
the watery foremilk
with its high acid content,
the fatty hindmilk
that separates in the fridge
to a thick skim
at the top of the flask,
and the nursing bra
like a complex lock
as you fumble, one-handed
at the catch.
ii
She has a stomach
the size of a marble
and feeds in and out
of days.
You are lost
to the manifold
stations of milk,
the breast siphoned off
then filling,
yellow curd
of the baby’s shit
you get down on your knees
at the foot of the change-mat
to clean,
holding your breath.
It was always like this;
a long line of women
sitting and kneeling,
out of their skins
with love and exhaustion.
From Bright Travellers. Reproduced with kind permission from Penguin.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best First Collection 2014
Bright Travellers
Fiona Benson
About Fiona Benson
Fiona Benson (b. 1978, Wroughton) won the Forward Prize for Best Collection in 2019 with Vertigo & Ghost, a collection whose central sequence was an astonishingly vivid reworking of Greek myth. Her forthcoming collection from Cape, Ephemeron, also features a long mythic sequence, from which her shortlisted poem ‘Androgeous’ is drawn. ‘It is a retelling of the minotaur myth, which tries to reinstate Pasiphaë, the minotaur’s mother, at the center of the story’, writes Benson. ‘Androgeus is her firstborn son, who is killed by a bull in mainland Greece.’
‘Androgeous’, and the sequence to which it belongs, were written during the first lockdown in 2020. ‘I thought at the time that I was indulging in a great act of escapism, travelling in my imagination to sundrenched Greece. But looking back at them they are all about being trapped.’
Forward Prizes History:
- 2021 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, shortlisted for ‘Androgeus’ (Times Literary Supplement)
- 2020 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, shortlisted for ‘Mama Cockroach, I Love You’ (Poetry London)
- 2019 Forward Prize for Best Collection, Winner for Vertigo & Ghost (Cape)
- 2018 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem, shortlisted for ‘Ruins’ (Wild Court)
