Want

Kate Welsh

Saw one bursting from an adult-size jacket.
Shape of its collapsible head at the zipper,
wobbling. Small stockinged feet dangling
like overripe fruit in an orchard. It has big,
wet eyes. Lips, too. Moist, no lines.
Empty pink gums on the verge of a cut:
gnashing promised, a temperature.
Monstrous and so hopeful, the way its kind
insists on morphing. I keep having
this dream of having one I must care for,
and want to. It is new and red and looks
at me with dewy expectation. No where
in my body do I feel it came from me:
no sore breasts, no tears between my legs,
no black stitches on my abdomen. But
I understand that to it, I am all it has.
What a thing to become a universe! Even
to a grub. The one I saw out there took in
the world with the attention of a priest—
not in awe, exactly, but patient in the wash
of wonder. To see a sidewalk penny gleam
for the first time. To smell the passerby’s
bad cologne. To hear a pigeon dumbly coo.
All with your universe’s thumb in your damp fist!
In the dream I make terrible faces at it and see
its small tongue loll, a sound erupting
from within it like a crow song, eyes
disappearing behind crinkled bluish lids.
I want to make it do that again and again.