Postpartum Is a Staring Contest
With pink eyelids held inverted
like two pig-warm, wet puckered tongues,
she is trying to see her own lashes. Oh.
You feel nothing for this spawning freak
show. Maybe mild repulsion. Or is it cute?
A lizard licking its own eyeball. Why,
you ask, but have learned to ignore
bodies as unmarked, earth-turned paths
potholing on past home. Wrecked. There is no
answer, even alien, anyway. Never is. Reach across
for the toothpaste then floss like the night
her mechanical wail first pierced your careful
sleep. Or the nights when you lay utterly unable
to recall flossing, unable to navigate the ceiling
fan’s whir and blur, unable to decide if the ruckus
she raised was irritating or cute, so you just lay
listening, red rimmed eyelids held
inverted like a labia’s slick that even
sleeping pills couldn’t penetrate. Pause to stare
now at the back of her lids turned organic as if
overnight, mirrored again and again see yourself
inverted, somehow your own grey eyes encapsulated
by her red, Martian terrain—eyes so bluntly
apprehended and forced to dream what another, that is
your real, non-robot self, should have done
or now be doing differently. Should you stay
her hands? Save her eyes? Do you really care
if these selfsame eyes tear wet or tear in two
busted and burst halves like a blistering tomato
skin? Her youth showing itself in a cliché
cherry pink. Remember how you learned
the bloated splits born of orchard torrents
will heal if the fruit bursts early enough
in the season? Seamed but tight. Unlike this
slow moving drain-belly ringed in rust, you
sigh. You old, out-of-date, rattling and hackneyed
computer—the kind before man dreamed artificial
intelligence might one day value love.
Stare. A dial-up modem grinding its teeth
in the silence and unable to even connect
lip to lip for a kiss because the glimpse
of her insides, like two worms escaping,
is so bizarre and unnerving it can’t be
processed—is so nails-on-circuitboard wonky
that your gaping, far away, and bone dry
image can’t melt—can’t stop—can’t stop—can’t
tear itself away; can’t invert, can’t even blink
a refresh for this mirror’s lack of sheen.