Robin Silbergleid is the author of the collection The Baby Book and the memoir Texas Girl. Born and raised in Illinois, she lives in East Lansing, Michigan, where she teaches and directs the creative writing program at Michigan State University. She also collaborates with the infertility art, oral history, and portraiture project The ART of Infertility.
from In the Cubiculum Noctum :
These are the baby hours, four a.m. in the rocking chair, suck suck swallow. Down the hall, the girl is sleeping. Downstairs, the cat is chasing a mouse. The mother rocks and holds. The baby swaddled tight. He is mewing. He is sucking in his sleep, or half-sleep, she can’t put him down or he’ll wake. This is not the family photo she imagined those long months of insemination and egg retrieval. Her whole body hurts, the arm from holding, the back, the belly muscles gutted. It’s deep winter, far from sunrise, and she slips the baby beside her in bed, closes her eyes and tries to dream. Needles. It’s always needles and syringes.
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