A Woman In The A&P Asks Me Where I Got My Baby
He was dropped off,
aisle 9, International Foods,
eye level on a shelf
between Goya and La Choy.
How funny,
but really?
Somewhere
murky and lightless,
the bottom of the Pacific,
Mariana Trench,
prehistoric hinge-jawed fish
idling blindly by. He couldn’t
breathe, his lungs suspended
in his tiny chest waiting for
oxygen to ignite them.
[rolls her eyes]
I thought
maybe you’d been
on a waiting list.
No wait,
I found him
at the Laundromat, naked
on top of towels,
towels still dryer hot,
so hot they hatched him
because he was an egg, a cracked egg,
and they were 100 percent pima
stacked to where absence turns blue.
Don’t be a bitch.
You know what
I mean.
Fine. The truth is
he straddled the red band
of my aurora borealis, the reddest band,
above the neon greens. He surfed the wind,
rode vaporous waves. A trail of sepia
clouds flowed behind him.
Robin Rosen Chang’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Yemassee, Paterson Literary Review, Juked, WomenArts Quarterly Journal, The Stillwater Review, Philadelphia Stories, Paulinskill Voices From Here, Volume II, and elsewhere. She is pursuing an MFA in poetry at Warren Wilson College’s Program for Writers. A current resident of New Jersey, Robin has lived in different regions of the U.S. as well as overseas.