1.
(Pregnancy)
You'd like to see the foliage of my skin so you start
with removing my mittens, removing my shoes.
I know what comes next: I stare at the meat
of your mouth pass through stages. From devour
to sour, shot without a chaser, bristling hot, to chaste.
You are at me as though my stomach has turned to flour,
wakened by my pregnant flesh, my protruding belly.
I like to place things in my body that alter it.
You were fathomless, as I casually replied, it's not yours.
It's an immaculate conception. A flowerless joke.
Your eyes are two sockets; your mouth, a maze.
My body has another one inside it – you are talking to two.
2.
(Dream Sequence)
I cry vodka and oh god! It burns! I run to the neighborhood well
and find my baby brother speaking a dead baby language. It's not funny; my arms swell
as I pick him up; a rash gathers near the base of my spine. I have forgotten the smell
of the earth's underbelly, cocooning ourselves inside cotton seeds. All was well.
Woe are we for forgetting how to speak the universal language of infants, the caterwaul
only underdeveloped fetuses can perfectly pitch. My brother stops short: again he is unwell.
I feel his fever with my lips. Where is our mother? Every adult has laughed her way to hell.
Where is the base of his spine? I hear a crack; I am growing child-bearing hips, small
eggs crack into our scalps. I am washing his hair. There is nobody. I am no longer tall.
I break yolks with the palms of my hands. Babies are having babies.
My eyes well.
3.
(Baby Inside Me)
The baby inside me is half hutu/half tutsi,
and roasting in the fire pit of my womb,
wears a transistor radio attached to a tomb.
The baby inside me commits hubris this morning.
He wants to wear designer clothes, be half machine.
I fucked a machine nine months ago.
The baby inside me saves for braces, college tuition.
He wants to study the way windmills dance.
The baby inside me hands me a note.
I will get cancer when I turn eighteen, the note says.
Will you still send me to parochial school? I drink one glass of wine
and the baby inside me turns somersaults, hiccups.
He will cry when he leaves. They always do.
Christine Jessica Margaret Reilly is currently pursuing her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence University. She received a bachelor's degree in Psychology and English: Creative Writing at Bucknell University. Two of her poems will be featured in The Clearing: Forty Years with Toni Morrison, 1970-2010, a book by James Braxton Peterson and Carmen Gillespie. She has been published in the Anemone Sidecar, Asinine Poetry, Breadcrumb Scabs, Blood Lotus, Canopic Jar, the Bijou Poetry Review, CaKe, Blinking Cursor., Louffa Press, and Eudaimonia. She has also been published in Bucknell's publications, Fire and Ice and Mirth Grinder. One of her poems was featured in an African Blues Art Installation piece in Bucknell University's Bertrand Library. She lives in New York.