Apologies to my OB-GYN

Sorry that my boy birthed himself

too early, took up so much room

in your prenatal nursery

with his two pounds, two ounces

and did not oblige your nurses

with easy veins.

Sorry we were such pains in your ass

asking you to answer our night calls like that,

and that he did everything so backwards:

lost weight, gained fluid

blew up like a human balloon

then shriveled.

Sorry about how he defied your prognoses,

skyrocketed premiums, weighted the costs

in your cost-benefit analyses,

skewed bell-curve predictions

into one long, straight line;

sorry he took so much of your time

being so determined to live.  He spent

today saving hopeless-case nymph moths

trapped in the porchlight, one matrix-dot

at a time, and now he’s asleep; blue wingbeat

pulse fluttering his left temple—there,

there again.  Just like it did then.

“Apologies to my OB-GYN” first appeared in Margie, Vol. 6, Fall 2007.