Delivery
They wheel me in screaming–
a surgeon
draws x’s down my chest,
tells me to open, open wide.
She balances
dead
crows on my hands, iceblocks
on my shoulders. Someone winds up
a gramophone:
it’s Chopin’s Nocturnes,
again.
The surgeon probes two fingers beneath
my ribcage,
and a fog drops like gauze
to the ground. I hear a horse gallop
and
whinny, crows frozen and heavy,
drop from treetops. The surgeon says,
try harder.
Where
are we going? I ask.
She leans in to kiss me, smoke hatching
on her
breath. She smiles like the moon
through the dead of night. I say,
I
can’t feel anything. I can’t
feel. . .
A round reflector lamp overhead blinks
off,
and
a white sheet crosses the ceiling
like a benediction. She says, you’re
giving
birth
to your father. She says,
a child is standing at the edge of
a forest,
turning
away. . . .
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