Manuela Palacios - Wet Nurse

Manuela Palacios lectures on Anglophone literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela (Galicia, Spain). She has edited, translated and written about Irish, Galician and Arabic poetry. Among the recent anthologies she has edited are Migrant Shores: Irish, Moroccan & Galician Poetry (Salmon Poetry 2017) and Ανθολογία Νέων Γαλικιανών Ποιητών - Antoloxía De Poesía Galega Nova (Vakxikon 2019). Manuela’s research on women’s studies, ecopoetry and the human-animal trope has, in recent times, set her on the stimulating path to creative writing.

Wet Nurse

In the cardboard suitcase, her lady’s presents diapers wrappings linen bodices petticoats frocks that the master’s children have used, like new, after all. They will look grand in her own children, those eleven cheeky rascals back North. The father a piper rarely around, the oldest girl in charge of the rest washing dressing feeding getting them to sleep Her sister nurses the little ones while she travels to the capital year in year out to nurse the master’s newborn offspring. These are her children too somehow she feeds them with her own milk, keeps vigil beside their sickbeds, and is, now, so proud of their thriving, but the little ones back North, will they know her when she returns this summer?