1.
To imagine your future unborn is to silently view your faults, personified. I look at blue cotton swabs, lace fine like petals. I turn around.

Yes? Is there something you wish to say?

A child leaps out of her chair and knocks the cereal over.

2.
Yeah.

1.
she says.

2.
I say stuff loud. I come from your rib; it’s smooth marble bone curved like a harp. I say stuff big, so big you double over in pain when I say, Listen!

1.
Who is born and who is already formed? I dedicate my life to the unmade one but there is someone already there. A little being, a pill that I feel caught in my throat.

2.
Sometimes I get stuck and cut off your air. I force you to listen. Make you leave work with mad voices in your head, shrink into a pea on the bus. You got no choice but to listen.

1.
It doesn’t matter how shaken I am, the child doesn’t let up. Please stop, I beg. I curl into an arc. A snake eating its own tail. I hold myself. A young self. I wrap my arms around; I am my own family; I am five years old. I want to think about my one-day child, but there is always a shunned whisper: child to child.

2.
I came first. I own her.

02/05/2005

Posted on 02/05/2005
Copyright © 2026 Lisa Marie Brodsky