The Baby

My mother weeps on the toilet, 
breasts between her knees.

Something chewing its way out—

She sits there lowing like a cow 
in a blue field, head bowed—

Stroke my back, she says,
& I do, palm coaxing the birth 
of halfway cells.

In the night-light she shudders & grunts, then— 
wet sounds.

My mother’s a biologist.
She once held my fingers against a test tube 
& explained the viscous cloud as life.

I was not amazed.

She’d spent two hours extracting the thing 
when I’d wanted her all to myself.

Finally she dumped it in a hazard bin 
& snapped off her gloves.

She took me out for fro-yo after
& let me have all her strawberries.

But this time it’s me holding her hands 
under the faucet, rubbing away seeds—

Read more from Issue 18.2.