Paper Dolls

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Only days after learning I’ll be a father,
I sit, 2am, glued to a docudrama
about a pair of infant twins attached
at the head. On the show they’re

getting ready to wheel the babies in
for surgery—no guarantees either
will survive. Beneath a twirling mobile
these conjoined angels torque and writhe,

all smiles. Leaning over the crib, the doc
looks down who hopes to sever them,
and their Mom, whose heart’s heavy
as a bag of shattered glass. In our room

my wife sleeps and someone sleeps
inside of her. Over our bed a bouquet
of razor blades hangs, a shadow
the TV makes of a spider plant.

Since our news, the hours now wobble
like bubbles from a playground wand,
every minute drifting, oblong, and sure
to burst. Look at that surgeon on TV now,

a cartographer with a Sharpie, marking
a dashed boundary in the skulls’ shallow
ravine where he’ll split the cranial continent
of these two boys. What a mess

of red roots. A slip of his wrist, and one
baby’s brain-dead or a goner. Cut to
weeks afterward: he peers down at these lives
he’s divided, alive and thriving for now,

then crosses the line saying I feel like
they’ve become my own children. Would-be
father of a tiny blooming cell, our rising
cuticle moon, I too am entwined

by these invisible threads. I climb into
our comforter as into a cocoon. Turning in
sleep, my wife who will be mother, moans.
So in love’s great sinew are we sewn.

 

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