Poem by Sarah Chack

Art by Lillian Anderson

A baby was removed from its mother last night. 

Its unformed, bird-like, bone fingers grappled 

for something to hold onto 

as it wailed and weeped, burrowed deeper 

into the flesh of her womb: 

a dying leech, a lost treasure, 

failure of a sycophant. 

Another one appeared shortly after, 

a newborn, newly born with 

splatterings of Red and Blue paint 

thrown across a half-formed flesh canvas, 

who was somehow more American 

than a Fourth of July celebration 

on the same day they offered your father 

a box of his own. 

With newly formed blood and skin 

(pores polluted with specks of a loss 

it would alway carry 

but never be able to name) 

the baby crawled 

forward on instinct, 

out of survival. 

I wonder now: 

can something be faulty 

at the very conception of its creation? 

Or is it learned 

when the alive-baby comes to know 

what the hardening of porcelain-soft skin, 

the fortifying of a feeble castle, means 

on a long summer night

when the first person they’ve ever kissed covers them in those same American Reds and Blues. 

Unborn. Removed too soon.