A Scientist’s Sonnet

Foreign breath is caught mid-air, gutted at the belly, cataloged
the hundredth. Sweet-mouthed, this child—
a jukebox of fissures, built upon a mother’s wilting smile.
Scientists called them logs how they stacked, cordwood
in snow. Water pools from Chinese bodies,
pushing salt down the tongue. You are the string bean strung
into the pore between belt and belly, speckled lung.
Relinquishment lives in the hollow of a doctor’s coat: bleached, blood-
stiff, seams heavy-hearted. Spine swayed, misshapen
into the comma ending a forced declaration.
Please: listen as the womb splits, shaping
Suffering into the shoulders of angels.
______My father’s daughter thumbs her belly.
______She wonders how it could possibly hold another.