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After Birth
On the front step—an orange
Nike shoebox held shut
with an elastic headband. I don’t
know what animal has been left
this time. Inside—a pool of blood
dampens bare brown cardboard. The sun
like a bright fist rises. I don’t want this
now, five in the morning and already
another dead thing—but in pink light
I see the blood is a placenta, attached
to a blind gray cloud of kitten. Her chest
quivers with breath. The blood
is her mother’s. An animal who doesn’t eat
her afterbirth leaves the kit, squawking
and blind, to die. As placenta decomposes,
umbilicus transfers living rot into the body
which I am holding here, in a cardboard box. I’m afraid
of the necessary severing. What if she bleeds,
what if she’s already beginning
to decay from within, bacteria filling
the smallest arteries, smallest heart,
smallest hungry belly? I lay her on a towel, across
from the gummy mass of tissue. It clings
to the fibers and she mewls, sniffs out warmth. Take
a hemostat, clamp umbilical cord and watch
the tissue become dead, and dry, and gray—then cut.
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