“Something’s in the water.” Chuckles surround.
“I’m due. Get ‘em out with spicy Thai.”
Down in straps infants spit-up over shoulder and lapse
the recurring flow–before nine and after one,
suckling two, singled out, like the single ones so few
within the stained. Glass. Body–broken.
Created to create, duty to do, should we adopt, a different view?
Turn a cheek when asked if trying instead of
shoving our Brothers and Sisters, sighing:

A gleam in God’s eye, a moat in mine.
Doused at a shower: games and pastel flower
present from the eye, a tear, ducks out early dashing hope
upon the rocks by Babylonian stream, the placenta’s quite salty,
but ’tis sweeter than bare melancholy.

Christened: yet another granny or grandpa’s claim,
last week’s was not averse to holy, genocidal names–
ache and money enough can get triple the glow, the pound,
the flesh, the ounce add up every week, you know, weighing down,
C-cups runneth over to nursery wants ten more
fingers, ten more toes, to fight the battle
in the basement of babies booming below.

Impregnated with fertility in winter–in spring:
proud pistils sing standing up theirs in-carnations
on Sunday two of–May the un-mothered run away.
But no matter the year, we worship a child in the end:
bowing to our cherubs in bathrobes, tiny babes in bulletin,
sliding through choruses on the backs of asses to Bethlehem.

For God so loved the world that he sent an advent series
every year to remind the shepherdess, in her barren fields,
to treasure up these things and ponder them.

Then sings your soul, my Savior god to me;
how great thou art. . . how great thou art!

No reason, no complaint
Other than a screaming “Why, why did you do it?!”

You don’t think that you deserve me and
That you would leap from tall buildings in a single bound.
I’m sorry if I never thrill you like someone else.
When you tire of the party, tell me.

If my opposite is ingrained, you’ll never change
Like the yearbook signatures: “Never change.”
But you can change, because I cry every night
Throwing objects against the wall from my bed
When I think of you in bed.
Then, I never want to see you again
Because I’m ashamed, but I would never tell you because
They believe you sometimes
One time,
Then you might break like porcelain.

For a millisecond
I wish I could have ran when I wouldn’t have felt guilt.
No matter what I say;
No matter if I can’t say anything
I still care.