Christina Cicchelli is an eccentric artist and poet in Austin, TX.

Inquiring About a Growth

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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.