There are three things the woman tells strangers: she is a prostitute, she is drinking coffee these days, and there is always a loud buzzing noise. She thinks about titles, frequently. The gravity they hold! "What if children were allowed in opera houses?" She thinks. "Did capitalism make me hate my mother?" The woman picks at her skin and the sheets are red from menstrual blood. The baby coos at her side. "Did you know mushrooms are all connected?" The woman whispers to the baby. "Like, underground. They are just one big orgasm." She says. "I mean, organism." The woman tells the baby that cell phones are made in sweatshops by girls the girl's age. The woman's mother's womb animates the woman in just over nine months about 32 years ago. The woman's mother's new groom inspects hail damaged Fords and the woman's mother's fibrous cocoon comes unglued, drained of liquid. The woman appears at the opening of her mother's insides. It is the summer of helicopter seeds; the earth is all swallowed up in the stuff, and the prairie sun is hot, smells wild. Then the woman grows and grows and is herself in labor. It is the summer of Joshua trees and the earth--and her body-- are extraterrestrial. White, perfect buds. Humans learn the language of trees and the trees say "ooooo, another equally significant, just different, part of me" and the sky turns silky with red-purple and the baby's eyes are stormy. The woman looks at the man. He floats up like a balloon, a blue balloon. They dance under pale light until the baby swims out, out of amniotic sea stuff and hemorrhoids the size of apples. The baby has roses for feathers, preternatural, really. The woman does not speak for a decade. Humans are so complex! Humans try hard--they just keep trying. The baby studies rabbits on YouTube. Sometimes, the bunnies' pellets fall to the kitchen floor and the woman sweeps them up in her hands. "More?" "Shoe?" "Milk?" "Patriarchy?" The woman is a public woman and this brings great sorrow, she imagines. The woman has an abortion; in a mop sink, she gets sick by dawn. "Hello? ... Hell-LO?" Lifetimes in hiccups. Two packs of cigarettes a day only cost the woman thirty crowns. There is a gypsy man in an old castle and at night he flutters a red scarf under sheets of absinthe and full moons and where flowers blossom from the bosoms of corpses. She collects little trinkets and wooden puppets for the baby, who is not born for hiccups and hiccups. When the baby is inside her, she shares a dream with the woman. Blue, like water, like blood, like... When the man's mother dies, he holds her hand and says "no more mistakes." The man throws his head at a wall. "You hurt," he tells the woman. The phone rings every morning at 10 o'clock but there is never anyone on the other end. The woman tries to make friends. It is so difficult! Mothers at the playground think the woman hisses and coils. She is not to be taunted or poked with sticks. She carries rattles in her pocket. The voice on the television says, "You, You there for 600." The woman is surprised to see herself there. "What is ham?" She answers. The man hoisting cars stares at the woman then he stares at the baby, who, in turn, asks, "what is millet? What is the Messiah?" The woman tries to be wise in her choices. She tries to be clever about the Daily Double. When the woman makes deadlines, the audience applauds but sometimes they laugh at her. It appears that the loud buzzing noise is coming from that black box; infinite refractions. The baby has a spoiling of cake at the woman's mother's house. "Is this a druggie thing? Are they underwater?" The woman's mother asks. "Why is a sponge wearing square pants?" One day, the woman's mother says, "I loved you even then, you know." And the woman knows. When the woman's mother's mother dies, mourners come in nice shoes, the kinds of shoes you keep in shoeboxes until someone dies. Later, they remark that the funeral had been "nice," in duck themed kitchens with books that don't open. The woman's mother's mother appears from behind a copper saint and says, "I must be dead." Snakes fall out of hair. The woman wonders if, To her husband she is after all nothing but the mother of his legitimate children and heirs, his chief housekeeper and the supervisor of his female slaves, whom he can and does take as concubines if he so fancies. The woman is paralyzed with such great fear of men! When she is onstage or in hotels, she thinks, "now, you'll never not see the things of men and of course they do not see you" and the woman is heavy with knowledge. Now, when she steps outside, she weighs 300 pounds. Old ladies with raccoons on their heads or maybe heads for raccoons say, "for this I know for the bible tells me so." The baby grows and grows into a little person who frets and screams and the woman thinks, "I am not a person who can do this." She reads that a woman put her toddler in the microwave. The woman checks the microwave. There is no baby there there. She cries, sometimes. There, there. No one roots for the whore, she thinks, not even the scoundrel who pays! The woman is sailing on a silver saucer with the baby all cuddly and warm at her breast. The baby coos and the woman whispers, "I love to you." The clouds pass overhead and the woman is surprised no one has mentioned the earth's pirouettes or its diminishing water yet today. ✱✱✱
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