Delivery

for Logan

You slipped from the placenta, melted
out of that paraffin into the yellow-blanket hug
of your mother. A boy, we said together,
breathless. Now your dresser full of pinks
and auburns like a painter’s dawn needs emptying,
re-filling of boyish hues and earth-tones.
The ultrasounds brushed

out the layers of you in grayscale-
your upturned face, the amnion cradle.
Lace pigments of a girl. How, son,

will I make you fit? The room I built
for you needs its paint
stripped, valances shipped back.
You need sleeved shirts and blue jeans.
What will you do

with a world built for someone
else? Your day-old whimper rubs like peach skin
against the news channel, its mugshots and bombs
rocking endlessly into the nursery.

I see you behind the glass:
a soldier, a journalist, crouching
back into the incubator, into this mausoleum.
What will you do with a world built for none
of us? They bring you

to me and we yawn together, your exhales the near
inaudible octave of the breeze. How
will I make you fit, I ask
again, your head a tulip bulb in my palm.
You cry in the washbasin, exhausted in a space

too loose, too tight. In your mouth I see your flesh
of my flesh and that you already know
what I do not: that I, too, am new

at this, that you know it’s the other way around-
that I must make this world fit you.