I spot a baby’s skull the size of a baseball sitting on the doctor’s desk.
He watches me eyeing it with unreasonable suspicion.
“It isn’t real,” he tells me.
I chuckle, fingering my cross.
“It’s a paperweight.” He flips through the pages
to find my prognosis. He tells me I can touch it
I do, carefully. While holding the skull like
a wine glass, I cradle the belief that this had once been
a newborn with thin, soft skin, downy head of black hair. He
feathery eyelashes, hazel bowl eyes brimming with a clear soul
and a down-turned porcelain mouth whose smile outshines the breaking
of dawn.
But he would have been a demanding child,
gnawing at my nipples, mewling in the middle of a humid night
when the cricket songs thrummed among overgrown threads of sweating grass.
He would be expelled much too soon, evicted from my premises
without notice, eviscerated in exile.