Postcard from a Baby
I found you as an artichoke with drawn butter. The smallest frog fine-toothed his own discovery before yesterday. Everyone is small in the infant ward. Chalk makes its dangerous way across the blackboard and you get hungry. The red popcorn of a match sits steady in your palm. You want to eat. To lick the edges of the soap. The psychic thought you were a mountain in a past life, because you had eaten dirt every day. You say, “Having a baby is the best way to get rid of toxins!” Will you have a mountain of a baby laced with dirt and a mind of blank chalk? A baby that whispers when it wins? Legs as columns in a turnip field, faces to the snow. Our bundles. Stock-still. That’s how we fell. And shoes, and fat, because they could be sold. (A bullet is expensive.) Walked and then we walked. A mountain of a baby that will run on snow, bones of birches daunted by its flight. A baby with toes made of black ice.
I have a red and starling infant, and my toes are perfect. (Everyone says so.)
—Carina Gia Farrero
bhanu makes carina an expensive bullet
I found you [write it down: a damaged eye with votive filaments]
The smallest frog fine-toothed his own discovery [Who
doesn't want to heal a human body?]
before yesterday. Everyone is small in the infant ward. [Who doesn't want a perfect
mountain of a baby laced with dirt and a mind of blank chalk?
That’s how we fell. And shoes, and fat, because they could be sold.
[The last scene is her, the gamine self
red and starling infant
kicking off her shoes as the house explodes behind her. Perpetrating, she doesn't flinch. Sips tea.
Keeps walking.
bhanu makes carina an expensive bullet: a monster response arranged by Ching-In Chen from Carina Gia Farrero's poem and Bhanu Kapil's Incubation: a Space for Monsters (Leon Works, 2006).
