FIVE POEMS
From Electrical the Embryo:
2 Weeks: Fertilization
5 Weeks: Embryo
16 Weeks: Spare Evidence for What Claim
23 Weeks: Ears
39 Weeks: Waiting
from Electrical the Embryo
The fertilized egg is a zygote.
Once it enters, a morula
burrowing into lush lining,
the uterus, a handbag
for a little ball of cells,
it is your blastocyst:
Beware of premature
celebration with cigars
(Don’t smoke.), wine
(Don’t sip.), or feta cheese
and luncheon meats
(Don’t eat.). Beware
the phantom feeling—
Did we? We did. Didn’t we?
Hidden, your blastocyst
plies its cells into what could be
any animal or small ghost.
Deep in your uterus,
your embryo,
a furious sesame seed.
16 Weeks: Spare Evidence fOR What Claim
For example, his legs, his head, and his eyes. His ears.
The patterning of his scalp. For example, his unrecognizable
locks. His growing toenails. Finally, his heart.
Turn on the radio and hustle music under your clothes
Turn on the sounds arranged for the arranging neurons
Your bundle of ears picks up the outside from inside now
Turn on the radio, sway her sloshed senses
Turn on the radio and dance her from squirm
Oh, she’s a mango with blood vessels prepared now
Tune out Mozart, give this girl some family dog
and vacuum familiar. Crank it up, sing it, beat it, belt it loud
She’ll know you spoken, she’ll know you sung now
Give her your ridiculous lovely song of dumb down joy,
Give her the fillers of forgotten lyrics and your siren call,
She’s swung from your every step, sway, and note now
Oh when she hears them she hears them
When she hears them she hears them she hears now
In the world, you weigh waiting;
in the interior, he continues.
He builds a layer of fat, weight.
You can’t wait for a layer of control.
It won’t come. He won’t come
when you want. You want him.
The outer layers of his skin already slough
to new skin underneath. How can he
have newer skin than the skin he is not yet
born into? Likely, he already knows how to wait,
knows how far to screw his head into
your pelvis. How to greet the world.
You don’t know. You have to wait.
You just wait until the after birth.
lives in Iowa, works in Illinois, and can occasionally be found idling somewhere in between. Her poems have appeared in Salt Hill, Stone Canoe, DIAGRAM, and elsewhere.