THE ENORMOUS FETUS
Thomas Trull
It milked a titan thumb in utero
clear as a Rorschach ink blot
on the closely monitored sonogram
The thousandth trimester passed
with no celebration from the lab coat grad
student assigned to watch the night
it passed
Half a woman lay preserved in sodium smoke
Mother
disintegrated
missed her window
mourned numb and then dead
both her womb and orphan inside a hospital on a bay
Her birth sac bobbed in a soup
thickly glazed with protein
wide and deep enough to comfort a whale
while tiny diving needles
probed and collected and beamed to a motherboard
Great lamps wheeled around a motorized track
Brilliant white penetrated the karo glistening ghoul
banked bent beams against the sac’s outer wall
grown black as a medicine ball
Some midnight behind the block white building
a barge sauntered alone across the bay
answered the greeting waves with the creak
of rusty iron
The barge moved
the cargo to a misty landfill across the bay
bins with garbage in cornrows stretching
from one side to another
under no moon the men heaving
a bubble of skin into the dark lick of saltwater
worked unmonitored by feminine eyes