But you knew it would be like this—one moment the neoplasm

looks almost like an infant, then the wet sound of maternal instinct

shifting open as you coax him, brush and plait his snotty off-pink

lump of cells     There there     making the biopsy out like

the avuncular cheek-pinch that it isn’t     It won’t hurt     I love you

Please don’t kill me     proffering the good-boy lollipop as if

to say     I’m sorry     I would like to live     as question first, before

(is it a question still)     I want to live!     The stupid baby

grin of the body rejoining:     Prove it     Well wasn’t it you

Back then     Was you     Who imagined     The kid brother

skipping beside you down your almost-girlhood’s lonely silly

tunnel; then it was your mother:      her skin that leapt

and multiplied, blackening as if      to meet your want. Now stutter

is his native tongue      Is yours     Like this     Simile     Pitter-

patter     Ba-ba     An-na     His cells repeat themselves, his cells

rename you. His voice pleats inside the body-cavity like a spoiled

organ, knotting what you’d like                   with what it isn’t.

What else could such a sound have coaxed from you—this teary

mitotic thing that looks back up at you as if     about to call

you mother—when your want alone had used to be enough.

When you hadn’t even had to ask.                                             ■

A man in my city was making headlines, luring women

to the streets with a tin baby. Night by night he set the wind-up 

gurgle toddling down the blackened stretch of alley where he lay.

Cops had caught     each other laughing on the radio. Silence

welled up in the gutters. Who could trust the sound of weeping

in the dark. I used to think it would be like that, but really it’s

like this:     the streets are paved with women

who in motherhood seeing death ran anyway toward it.

The tin baby tells me I could raise an almost-brother, as if     when

the doctors coaxed him from my mother they had laid him down

to sleep in me.      Little ectope     comes the tin lullaby

like you           I am outside my place with     whatever might reduplicate 

behind my skin. One moment it seems right to name him.

Then he     Invaginates     His private room

That’s him now—you can feel him kicking like an unposed question

in my flesh. He’s curled up behind the matter

of my mother’s body,           still producing

from its place inside the poem—as if she were any mother

in a poem. As if I knew exactly what she’s doing here.                        ■