Someone wants to sell us a pellet for the lawn. Someone is selling a vial of pork sperm.
The sow is ready for a turkey baster when you press her hind parts and she stands strong.
Ready for a mount, right there in the pen. Bacon proliferate, more baby pigs.
A low plane sprays some cousin of mustard gas onto the field and pretty soon it is Food halleluia
a green revolution— now approved for civilian use. And the tumors too. Surgeons reshape us
into perfect baby makers with the same silicone they used to remake the maimed.
Husbandmen— play boar. Play ball across the neon lawn of america.

I was given all the equipment to fill a few more seats in the bleachers but I won't.
A european-american uterus. Do you want to be in this kind of pain
for another fifteen years? asks the dinosaur dressed as a gynecologist
when I decline his pill.
To fathom is to drop your line into water.
He chooses not to fathom this kind of pain even wrist deep.
There is something suddenly veterinary about this pelvic exam.
Damaged animal I am not though I am so animal.
A fathom is the length of an outstretched arm.
Closer than that I need you. If we are going to make anything together.

Here is what I bring to the table— poems. Poems is what I bring to bed.
No one calls the side of the highway fertile but we could disappear
for a few minutes in the thick of those weeds.
Treason! Shouts the diaper company and the algorithm salivating for another teen.
Incarnation on this continent involves each of us a unique dialogue with the dead.
The dead of this land. Know my name too well.
Dead who gave me your hands— why am I here if not the obvious job of babies?
Another crop, an essay, a red day to writhe through.
The word fertile shares its emphatic syllable with suffer. It is about what we can bear.

By the way the baby is in a basket in my bed tonight. I am the gay neighborhood doula
who watched his parent push him out and stuck around to help.
He stirs the air with his arms and smiles at nothing.
Already calling him “he” hurts a little— he is
scottish-italian-nordic-american “unplanned”
and has a lot of artists around
in the midst of our own attempts at being unprecedented and careful with words.
He figured out how to use his eyes recently, but remains, at this writing, indiscriminate
with the all-accepting gaze you mostly see on pictures of saints.
I am fertile for the gaze of a saint.

Which means I can bear it, can carry it, can blossom and have fruit from it
can make another me who cries with the simplest hunger
and sleeps peaceful against the breast of the idea of the mother.

The idea of the mother— our denigrated basic sacred.
Milk and honey is not a far off land it is, look it up, the constituents of colostrum
which your regular clueless courage of a mother had waiting for you, Laura.
And you mourn the loss of the old ways.