My Unborn Child Says to Me

You are a mouse in a dove’s coat.

An apron with hands: 
that’s what I didn’t want to be, I replied. 

It’s taken you a long time to catch on.

But is it a race?

Time grew tired waiting.

He’s sexist. 

You’re binary.

I don’t think I was strategic.

No, you wanted to be free of the past. 
                                   Untethered.
  To step into a stream like your mother, 
walk one narrow slice 
             of water after another. 
                                                    Mayflies rising. 
A world—constantly changing, 
             shimmering. 
                                         You felt this was New York.

That sounds right.

See, I knew you before you saw the stream. 
I lay inside you 
            when you curled within your mother. 
I was one of your last two eggs—
                          you saw me on the sonogram: remember? 

I look at my right thumbnail—
misshapen from picking at cuticles. I can’t 
see this child now, 
but for the voice. 

We come accidentally and try to find our place.

I have been hungry before: in the south of France, 
the cypress, the picnics, the boy’s lips. Simply too animal.
Unprotected, we were. But everything else receded, 
a blaze of heat pushing outward, filling 
me. Probably a late period, so I went to his doctor 
and he recommended a wash, 
just from the pharmacie, 
nothing much.

Yes, I recall: Aix comes from Latin for water. 
          You 
               have never been ready.

I was 
pursuing the boy. 

And then you didn’t trust 
    your body again.

I think it scared me.
 
You worry too much about the past. 
     Stop dwelling 
there.

Where did you get so bossy? I mean, so 
definitive.
 
I got it from you, dear.