Child Imagined
When my daughter is hatched with one arm bowed
and hollow, is half downy, is cut from me molting
and chirping like tin from one lung while she wails 
with the other, and flutters and flails, I will know how she came
to her body. When my daughter will not bear her swaddle, 
when she swans her growing body toward every clean space, 
when she’s clumsy in gravity, half of her crawling and half 
of her hovering low, I will know that we’re in her, dividing
again and again. When she learns to sling her wild arm, a dead-
weight low along her hip as all her feathers sharpen, darken,
thrush-like, shining and she strains against the strangeness 
of her blue-black seams, I’ll see you wrenching at the space 
where skin gives way to plume. We will have done this to her, 
yes. Halved creatures make halved daughters, or so the splitting goes.
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