How do you wait, between placid sheets?—
your seed-pearl, red-head eight-pound child
grown in collusions of feeding, bulging
the pod of your belly like a melon,

whorled thing set to unfurl from your womb
in release, but just now—right out of you cut,
swiped in a heist the wrong way out, whisked off
to sterile Intensive Care, a cubicle

for observation, while your womb flattens down
these long fretting days (that briefest glimpse
of your bloodstream’s slow, inaudible work
of fantasy: all you get to hold)—

or fidget at home, some thirty-odd streets away,
needing the bundle of your insides
to nestle outside, on your chest, heartbeats
in sync, or in the crook of your armpit

trying not to scream to get your body back.