She bent over dishtowels
brown against her teeth
holding her screams
holding the girl in her belly.
.
He held a stopwatch
clicking at time,
ballpeen hammers on brass.
.
Thirty seconds ate the earth
and the green in her blind eye
and her cervix was eaten by scorpions.
Thirty seconds ate the nails off her fingers
and pulled all the hair back into her head.
She vomited in the sink to make room.
.
He held the stopwatch
clicking at time,
dentist scraping eye teeth.
.
She suffocated on her cervix
trying to claw into her womb
where the only new life in her body
scraped hard, digging to emerge
as a girl.
orphan poems 