“The Foot Literally Popped Out of the Brain”

For Paul Grabb

Twin, I’ve had enough of your bickering.
Your punches, slowed by amniotic fluid
Smashes into my ear and I’ll
Always be a little deaf in that one and
Sport a cauliflower scar.

Our mother, so clueless
Thinks we’re dancing to classical music.
But the kick she feels is me pounding
My head into your round belly
Again and again and again and
It cannot be enough

My fingernails, half –rising out of the roots
Of my fingers like conquering crowns
White crescent moons ineffectually stabbing
At your alien face, formed of blastocysts only
A short while ago I
Claw at your body
Bite at your nose
Kick you in your anus.

But when you’re sleeping both eyes shut
(Virgins, never opened
Gifts of pale eyes)
Because your umbilical cord is too short
And my pebble biceps are not strong enough
Yet
To rip it out, suffocate you, dislodge it
(Believe me, I’ve tried)
Let you die tumbling off, trailing nutrients and waste
Let me give you your own space odyssey ending
Your face crashing into the alfombra of our womb
Home enough for just one of us
I’ll squeeze you in my body so tight
I’ll force a diamond out of you.
A gift for the lucky surgeon when he slices
Me open, cracks my screaming left from my wailing right
To remove and receive you,
Like a desired pearl
Covered in my bloody nacre.

“130,000 Inflatable Breasts Lost at Sea”

Bobbing, they meet their first dolphin.
He rollicks, a gray rubber crescent
Sliding between their peachy domes.

Squeaks on squeaks.

But they have not traveled this far
For a slippery mammal. No, they escaped
From their sea crate for more, shook loose
From their tethers, popping out below the ropes
One by one like playing limbo.
They abandoned ship like rats.

To be a giveaway for a man’s magazine,
There was no future in that.
These breasts were born to travel.

And there was never so much sky,
Or seagulls, or albatross. Or seaweed,
Draping their faces like hair, tangling them, encrusting them
With salty, ropy strands so
That some of them could only peek out, shyly.

Some of them will make landfall.
Some of them may even be scavenged, taken up by Somali pirates.
But for now, they float,
Water slowly inching up to their areolas and down again,
Sometimes flooding over their delicate noses momentarily.

Innocent faces turned upward, from a plane they look
Like thousands of eyes glinting, hungry.