The fetus in me grows, glows knowingly, nuzzles its nodes, the two burnt-out bulbs that gave it a start. 5 Now, nurtured like a shirt in the wash, alphabets appear in its stew. The mix is as warm as tepid soup. The letters spin like dials, like stars 10 in the stubbed-out substance as consoling as bad milk. But look at the baby, its bald eye, the thin, angelic webs reaching like fingers to grow it shut; 15 my eyelids flutter like a shocked heart. The baby basks in its Mediterranean, sulking hub of suds, it is new, new, new! It wears its body like a shirt, 20 unafraid of nails, of lies, of hates, of regrets downed with the sugarless coffee. The shirt doesn't flinch from the hammer that batters 25 firetongs that pinch the skin, love harrumphing with its daggers in, plain as the mail on the table, plain as the no-nose on the lump of its face, the club of its skull 30 milky as an escaped gasp. The shirt simply hangs, waiting to be put on, like a night-club crowd, waiting to be touched like scissors, waiting for the worst 35 to enter it, like a man, to make a sail sailing somewhere, to some purpose perhaps to fill it with winds like hands burdened with an excess of gifts, waiting for some breath to stretch it 40 like a manfully handled canvas to take it into the hands of its mouth and make it wake up and shudder like a lung. The shirt must do something inside of myself! 45 The shirt is there, alive in its hamper, its buttonholes waiting for hooks to pull the buttons through like flowers and hold itself shut. The shirt is there, cautious 50 (you'd better believe it) suspended in its char of suds, hanging like a kite in the black sky of my uterus. My sky of warm liquids and tepid laughter, 55 hanging, hanging, by its little miracle string, ready to whoosh down and pull me through myself like a turtle entirely reversed. But for now the shirt, 60 limp on its elephant of skeleton still reels and flutters like a clasped flag from its knot of hand.
From the collection "Hymns"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.