FAIR WARNING

FROM YOUR FETUS:

TREVOR NEWBERRY

From inside the womb, I hear them cooing

over me, who’s yet to be born still,

and I want to dig my malformed fingers

into this suffocating lining and pull

as hard as my arm will let me.

I want to warn them.

And I’ll say, Robin,

I know you’re picturing me popping out

as a handsome melange of you and Greg,

full head of hair, but truth be told,

I’ll only inherit our family’s forgotten fat gene,

and instead of the taut frame you might expect,

(the one Greg had in the 70s,

his jeans cowboy-slung on his narrow hips,

jutting chin like a third-month bump)

I’ll be pudgy,

to say the least: By thirteen, my tits,

yes, tits, will be so pointed and pronounced

that I’ll spend hours in the mirror

groping them while pictures of girls from school

flash by like one-inch frames from future home movies,

sometimes pinning pencils under their folds,

seeing how many they’ll hold.

I’ll come home crying sometimes,

lock myself in the closet-sized bathroom,

and you’ll wonder how this happened

and blame yourself, the white light under the bathroom door

unfurled upon the hallway tile.

Wait, wait, wait, I skipped a bit:

I’ll cry for no reason. Not just while in diapers,

when you expect the unbridled screaming weeps

to come and go like menstruation,

but even at eight years old, when I’ll be so anxious

about what the fuck I’m going to do

with my life, that I’ll ditch kid-hood

and lock myself in my room

and read every musty text in my book bag,

scratching my head till it aches and begins to bleed,

the metric shuffle of well-worn pages

wafting from the chipping doorframe.

I’ll get thin, though.

Starve myself. But, to be fair,

I know you expect me to love like you love Greg,

and I should tell you that I won’t.

At fourteen, when I finally find someone

who’ll touch me despite my tits--I’ll keep my shirt on anyway,

her fingers tugging at the hems--

I’ll love her so hard

that she’ll dump me from the safety

of the other side of a closed door, her tongue

in another boy’s mouth.

This kind of thing will happen again

and again and again and again (the need for real love

yanking harder with each failure),

so, by nineteen, I’ll fuck anything

within my dick’s humble reach.

I’ll woo too-young girls

into my bedroom with a well-liquored mouth

and aggressive hands fumbling

at the buckle of my own tight-cinched belt.

But, Mom,

I want you to know, that I’ll fall in love, too,

real love, eventually, and she’ll worship

every shitty part of me, she’ll savor my mistakes

like breakfast, she’ll even cook breakfast for me,

and standing naked in doorframe after we make love,

still stinking of sex, she’ll peek in and say, When is a door

not a door? and I’ll lean up, wipe my face,

and she’ll say, When it’s a jar. And we’ll laugh,

and life will feel right, and all of those bitter frames,

those plaguing celluloid dreams trapped in my vault

will all burn into nothing, puddling out my ear,

onto the sheets, down the dust ruffle, across the carpet,

and to her feet, to the door.

And then, I’ll fall asleep, naked,

slicked with sweat, pulling the covers over myself,

up over my head, until I’m a lump on the bedframe’s gut,

and I’ll dream, but no longer of the horrors

of how I learned to live, the aborted loves,

the long, longing nights without sleep or dreams, no,

but of those things I’ve yet to learn, the future.

When she wakes me, she smiles, she always smiles, slowly sliding

the duvet from my face, a slit,

a beam of light pulling at my head,

and finally, Mom, I’m born.