Pumping Milk

Topless at the office
like a scandal,
I stand otherwise constructed:
trousers, polished black shoes, 
hair a neat crop, the reds 
of my face muted by beige smear.
My affair here is with
a machine. I’ll soon hook up with
plastic trumpets, turn on 
my motor, get milked
for a baby forty minutes away.
But it’s this bare moment before
that stuns me, dangling bra-less 
like half of me is made 
for spring break gone primal, 
the other half 
will write a memo.
Is this what it means
to be a mother? The self
split in two, like the body in labor? 
Or is this just the tear
in humanity, even as we 
shoulder-pad our denial: 
always tugging us back 
to the garden, to the beginning, 
which wears the same 
clothing as the end?