7.09 / Parenting Issue

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.


P. J. Williams teaches English to the future in Apex, North Carolina. His poems are chilling somewhere in Red River Review, Counterexample Poetics, Cartographer, and Mixed Fruit. He is the Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Utter. He hopes to find himself in an MFA program in 2012. Follow him @MeatSoda and @UtterMagazine.