Front Porch Morning In Which Wind Chimes Portend Newborns

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^{Shhh, not now my love, I am dissociating to Patsy Cline. Fine. There are things
we are owed. Truth, the unmolding of the bread when rent is due, the beautiful bubble
of consonants in the word rutabaga. Really, yes, the abjection of the infant
confounds me. Its odd unnecessary smallness—
unnatural, really, like baby corn. Wriggling limbs, yelping toothless out of a
turnip-head. Decidedly unbeguiling. How could such ravenous palpitations invoke
such a helpless ugliness?
The unsightly, I do suppose, begets the unsightly. Speaking of blood and sweat,
have you inquired, perchance, at the Son Of God’s next door on how best
to live forever? That Jesus, you know, I bet he knows a thing or two
about a thing or two. Living eternal in everyone’s hearts and all. Oh,
the incoming immortality we could hold if only
we were jellyfish! Simply a refusal
to come to any end. These days the act of staying alive
looks so much like swimming in all of my sins at once. I am picturing a house
made of liquid evil: my writing desk floating in the amniotic fluid
of storytelling, a bobbing, decapitated Roget in place
of a rubber duck. When did God ever say the act of making
was anything but vile? I never came from any Adam; keep your ribs to yourself, please. Look,
I could never teach a tiny, innocent thing that in order to fry the chicken
you must first be accustomed to an axe in the hand
to separate its head from what is useful. What does that say about hunger? About clipped wings?
Only violence begets comfort. Only blood informs any feeling of wholeness. And even then,
how could I devastate my own offspring with the obvious temporary of our bodies? So damning. So
instead, I am writhing in pleasure
for pleasure’s sake. And you, my love, joking about immaculate conception
while wearing a strap on. I am baring my fangs
at the word procreation, as if
we are not already creating
Rorschach sheets with sweat and period blood. Red, splotching art
of the unbridled subconscious and the entire, wide open conscious, too. Yes,
here, there are new definitions
of womb envy: the envy
to lack one at all.}