AFTER READING MICKEY IN THE NIGHT

KITCHEN FOR THE THIRD TIME BEFORE BED

I'm in the milk and the milk's in me ... I'm Mickey!

My daughter spreads her legs

to find her vagina:

hairless, this mistaken

bit of nomenclature

is what a stranger cannot touch

without her yelling. She demands

to see mine and momentarily

we're a lopsided star

among the spilled toys,

my prodigious scallops

exposed to her neat cameo.

And yet the same glazed

tunnel, layered sequences.

She is three: that makes this

innocent. We're pink!

she shrieks, and bounds off.

Every month she wants

to know where it hurts

and what the wrinked string means

between my legs. This is good blood 

I say, but that's wrong, too.

How to tell her that it's what makes us---

black mother, cream child.

That we're in the pink

and the pink's in us.