It’s Easier to Come Clean in the Third Person
Lean back, and watch the almost father flounder:
he’s become an enormous pair of eyes, isn’t
holding his wife’s hand. Her hands relax across
her chest, bare belly a soft gong. Below her navel,
through scallops of gel, the wand transmitting
to the sonogram glides. She shivers, but he doesn’t
move. Under skin, on screen: some gray
flinching. The room erupts in coo.
The physician’s gloves blur French nails,
shadows flutter the white walls, the bed,
the machinery purring and clicking.
The motion before his eyes could be a gull
in an oil slick. He studies the screen for a face
patterned with light. For an elbow. A heel.
Pregnancy Date Night: Chinese Takeout
It could be her lo mein or his lemon chicken
pitching forward, from knees, through midriff to chin,
her body. She dips and trembles, wretches again,
cries, her straightened hair gathered in his hands.
This again? For months mid-meal she’d blanch—
no pattern to what might trigger the bunched
lower lip, nose droop, held breath and rush
from the table. Mashed potatoes? A raw radish?
Toast? He’d made a private game of it—guess
when the evening ends. And her game? She shrugs
into pajamas. He picks up her clothes. He scrubs
the toilet. Outside, finches in the shrubs,
cumuli like river foam. He locks up. He scours
their forks and plates. He lets the disposal growl.
David Thacker is a PhD candidate in poetry at Florida State University and holds an MFA in poetry from the University of Idaho. A recipient of the Fredrick Manfred Award from the Western Literature Association, his poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Subtropics, The Cortland Review, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.