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Vo l . 4 N o . 1
“Lunar Eclipse”
More Moon Moon! calls the baby, more moon! Awake with language tonight, she finds moons rising ubiquitous-streetlamps, porchlights, storefronts. The sidewalk a galaxy, the whole city stippled with silver, with toys and spoons dropped again and again to see if gravity sticks. Down our late path, she cries moon, moon, moon! and each time the meaning turns new: how small I am, how large the night pearl upon pearl in my satchel of words as you wane to nothing, I learn to be Someday she will know light from light-for now, let her world shimmer. I lull her to sleep, and then myself, whispering moon, moon: as I wane to nothing, you learn to be how lush-spun the velvet on valley and field trail of gems, brightly tipped and dreaming
Patrick Dixon
Olga Livshin
Baby’s Heartbeat To hear our baby, we go to a room full of pictures of women’s internal organs. They look like a color-coded salad: a seedless red uterus sidled up to curly parsley, but the parsley ran away with the vagina. Then the doctor came out from behind a giant Asian cabbage and started the fetal heart monitor. To see our baby, we consult a bearded wizard. The ultrasound is a box powered by tiny bearded men who make little boys beat down on glass anvils with tiny glass hammers. And when our baby is born, immaculate specialists! at Providence Hospital! will teach us how to kiss him. The unborn child lives in the world. But the closer we get to him, the less real it seems: that a small person shines in the darkness that he feels and hears us. That in a couple of years he will tell us how he feels about all this.