Poem: Divination I

Pentax 645N | 75mm F/2.8 | Kodak Gold 200

You can open your fridge
On a lame Tuesday afternoon, or a Thursday,
Or any other day when clouds divine your day for you
with your bored palms touching cold sheets of iron
pulling what could have been the gates of hell
Your eyeballs
scan what is in front of you
while your mind tries to remember
why you opened the fridge in the first place
and there they are:

A tray of chicken eggs.
And you could never lie to me
about not ever wanting them hatch inside your fridge
at some point in your life, although your rational brain suggests otherwise
with your science-backed vaccine-related postings
you know a chicken egg
is just a preincarnate omelet
But the eggs hatch
and out comes the infants in blood-red yoke
drowning your senses in a caucophany of infant voices

My wife tells me that all my daughter’s eggs
are already inside her even before she reaches puberty
And I could never lie to you how I rejoice
about all the generations of life that is inside her
in the horizon of her childhood
a sequence of genetic code
weaving the strings of time
a portion of human history encapsulated—
men after men women after women—
inside her ovaries, a universe ready to burst

I rejoice
And in my daughter’s case
Was not her birth surely my birth?

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