A Promise for the Egg Filled with Cotton Balls

I drink down a little round white word 
and wait for the unnamable ghosts
to leave my body, my body a nest 
made of the finest cement. 
I am asked in waiting rooms, 
Is it a yellowthroat or a redwing? 
It is a cowbird, I must answer, 
it’s a bullbird. Still, I will raise 
any word I have been given with its 
wide open fig red mouth. 
There is always enough, 
I lie, I can be a fraction of a mother.
I can be halved and halved again, the last 
morning star floating in steamed milk, 
a little bite of me will always be left 
for you and you and you and you and you.

Elizabeth Hughey is the author of two poetry collections: Sunday Houses the Sunday House (University of Iowa Press) and Guest Host (National Poetry Review Press).  She is the co-founder and programming director at the Desert Island Supply Co. (DISCO), a literary arts center in Birmingham, Alabama, where she teaches poetry in the public schools. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in the Bennington Review, Open Letters Monthly and Tinderbox Poetry Journal.