Cantaloupe Face Punch Nephew Supreme

By Amie Whittemore

When I look at him I want to swallow his head like a peeled cantaloupe, seeds and all. Other times, I want to twist each of his squishy limbs like they’re wet rags. I can almost hear the tendons snap and the feeling is so disgusting and delicious, my breath quickens.

            Of course, I cannot tell his mother, my sister, this. She belongs to a Wine-of-the-Month Club. Her nail polish never chips, not even while washing dishes, which her husband always does anyway. If she knew, she would probably deem me unfit to babysit—as if I’d actually squeeze him until his ribs cracked like delicious little breadsticks. But, if it were not for these Saturday afternoons with Jack while she teaches graduate students to be therapists, I’d go insane. I’d start flirting with busboys. I’d buy a cat or small bird. I’d develop hobbies.

            “Being an aunt is permission to love wildly,” I told my book group over mimosas last week. They are all 20-something women who don’t know yet, how rare that is. I’m thirty-three, the Jesus year. Like Jesus, I want to gut a thousand fish and feed them all to my nephew until he pukes. I want to tattoo his three-year-old face on my bicep and become a professional weightlifter.

            Today, Jack and I spent the afternoon at the zoo. On the drive home I asked what his favorite animal was and he said the gorilla. He pronounced it “more-rilla,” which I like better, actually. We pounded our chests at red lights and made jolly growly noises at passing cars.

            When I returned him to his mother, she reminded me her class was over; I was released from aunt-duty. “Great,” I said and it sounded like I was balancing a piano on my tongue. “That’s great.”

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About Amie Whittemore

Whittemore is the author of the poetry collection Glass Harvest (Autumn House Press), the 2020-2021 Poet Laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. Her poems have won multiple awards, including a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prize, and her poems and prose have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Nashville Review, Smartish Pace, Pleiades, and elsewhere. She is the Reviews Editor for Southern Indiana Review and teaches English at Middle Tennessee State University.

Web: http://www.amiewhittemore.com Twitter: @amiewhittemore Instagram: @amiewhittemore Facebook: /amiewhittemore