Poetry
31 January 2024
“This poem is a powerful expression of disorientation: the reachable language that comes when one is tired and one’s world has been altered by new life. There’s irony in the repetition of the advice refrain: “sleep when the baby sleeps,” and this irony straddles humor and exhaustion, a demonstrable absurdity of the upside-down-ness of new parenthood. The dashes as stanza breaks can be read as tick marks or time-markers, each representing a unit of time passed until the “we” become, in their sleepless existence, “radiant as stripped wire…shed absolutely everywhere.” “Sleep when the Baby Sleeps” is not just a poem but a reality set forth with language. If you listen, it ticks like a clock, like a life.”
-2022 Contest judge Kimberly Grey
Sleep When the Baby Sleeps
intoned like a prophecy curse or omen sleep
when the baby sleeps
/
we’d need to. we needed to
more than plates need washing
more than clothes need folding
& tucking into their clothes cribs
//
we knew this. people saw the ink saddles
under our eyes & telegraphed
[cluck cluck] these two are impossible
must be sweeping floors again
///
oh no we were to sleep when the baby
would sleep like a baby—
except the baby would not sleep
////
Sleep When the Baby Sleeps. lost play
by Pinter or Beckett in which no one sleeps
Baby is the village’s chef du sommeil
/////
monster movie law
means a lead vampire governs all other vampires
we would sleep when the lead vampire slept
//////
when the baby did not sleep
I missed the sound of a thumb
dragging a hum
from a clean lip of glass
//////
/
I moved in the light world
//////
//
put food in baskets not all choices made sense
fuck thee off bag of flour god what
do you think you’re doing here
//////
///
how made to make work to bind
what would otherwise
collapse into a pool
//////
////
but so soft
so pillow soft. to break a fall
I left & did not return
the shopping carts to their pens
//////
/////
we wakewalkers
raw & irredeemable
radiant as stripped wire parts of us
shed absolutely everywhere
//////
//////
Jen Jabaily-Blackburn was twice selected for Best New Poets (2014 & 2016). Her most recent work is forthcoming or has appeared in On the Seawall, Couplet Poetry, Indiana Review, Radar Poetry, The Common, and Massachusetts Review. She lives in Western Massachusetts with her family, where she is Program & Outreach coordinator at the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College.