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.