Gender Reveal
On the doctor’s scale, baby pulls at his penis: crenellated shaft with all color blown out
except the slit, which is faint, purple-pink of whelks. Oh the nurse laughs, that’s him
just being a boy. She winks like I know something she knows, measures him foot to crown.
It began long before this: in that ultrasonic cloudspot, back when his body
was mostly horse hooves and ectoplasm, they searched for it first, claimed
boy! for the form’s interruption, first sputter of mist. Later, the question morphed
to did you, meaning what had we done with the prepuce, that allowance
of perfect skin. I refused to answer. Mind your own damn business.
But after birth’s cruelty, the tachy heart and tangle of cord, strangers’ light and noise,
how could I tamper with his shimmery margin, what barely contains the spark
under the surface. From the way people ask—asking and asking
crystalizing into a catechism—it’s almost like the organ makes a boy
supernatural. So I close the diaper fast, fasten his clumsy veil.
Oh, if he be part god, let him be the kind that comes to earth
concealed. Not for conquest. Without arrows. Let him fall asleep in flowers.
Dew coaxes his hair into tighter curls, one tenderness preserved.
Abecedarian Re: Actually, I Don’t Go By Mom
Abstraction that I am, I scour the branches of biology’s keys, find
binomials can’t articulate what I am to you. Like careless
clover or witchgrass, at first I mimicked midsummer passion,
doling out my seeds willy-nilly. Because by what logic does a female
evolve into something that breeds on the wind? The truth is, I
felt nothing that came from me could ever latch &
grow elsewhere. While your bones were forming, I slept
head beside you, but separated by partitions of flesh & air.
It’s no wonder you were strange to me when you arrived.
Just as her tissues imprinted with choreography—
kip and pikes, your every jab and oscillation—I became inversely
lost, mostly irrelevant. Your moves erased themselves long before
making their meaning clear. Then, summing myself up with
nomenclature, I asked: What do you call my kind, which is
ovular but has no culture beyond the cellular? I’m more like
paternity’s synonym, especially if you lose the tail. The impossible
questions people have asked me: Is that really your experience to claim?
Rogers, after all, is the children’s surname: men whose fathers often
slunk out without a note. I am never fucking leaving this house, I
told my wife once to win an argument, both of us exhausted from childrearing’s
ubiquitous labors. A good joke: Even my name, Beth, means “house.”
Very conducive to writing those mommy poems. But I’m not mom, I tell
writers who think I’ve gone soft, given up deeper subjects. As if these wild,
xenogeneic offspring aren’t a full-on wrestle with the deep. Listen:
you know I’ve not gone soft. If anything, I’ve gone more muscular,
zigzagging across creation’s limits, throwing off the names as I go.
