Postpartum Is a Staring Contest

With pink eyelids held inverted

like two pig-warm, wet puckered tongues,

she is trying to see her own lashes.  Oh.

You feel nothing for this spawning freak 

show. Maybe mild repulsion. Or is it cute?

A lizard licking its own eyeball. Why,

you ask, but have learned to ignore 

bodies as unmarked, earth-turned paths 

potholing on past home. Wrecked. There is no 

answer, even alien, anyway. Never is. Reach across 

for the toothpaste then floss like the night

her mechanical wail first pierced your careful

sleep. Or the nights when you lay utterly unable

to recall flossing, unable to navigate the ceiling 

fan’s whir and blur, unable to decide if the ruckus 

she raised was irritating or cute, so you just lay 

listening, red rimmed eyelids held 

inverted like a labia’s slick that even 

sleeping pills couldn’t penetrate. Pause to stare 

now at the back of her lids turned organic as if

overnight, mirrored again and again see yourself 

inverted, somehow your own grey eyes encapsulated 

by her red, Martian terrain—eyes so bluntly 

apprehended and forced to dream what another, that is 

your real, non-robot self, should have done 

or now be doing differently. Should you stay

her hands? Save her eyes? Do you really care 

if these selfsame eyes tear wet or tear in two 

busted and burst halves like a blistering tomato 

skin? Her youth showing itself in a cliché 

cherry pink. Remember how you learned 

the bloated splits born of orchard torrents 

will heal if the fruit bursts early enough

in the season? Seamed but tight. Unlike this 

slow moving drain-belly ringed in rust, you

sigh. You old, out-of-date, rattling and hackneyed 

computer—the kind before man dreamed artificial 

intelligence might one day value love.

Stare. A dial-up modem grinding its teeth 

in the silence and unable to even connect 

lip to lip for a kiss because the glimpse

of her insides, like two worms escaping,

is so bizarre and unnerving it can’t be 

processed—is so nails-on-circuitboard wonky

that your gaping, far away, and bone dry 

image can’t melt—can’t stop—can’t stop—can’t

tear itself away; can’t invert, can’t even blink 

a refresh for this mirror’s lack of sheen.