Birth Plan

Behind a sterile blue curtain, the doctor announces:
It’s a bloodless extravagance!

Bird-legged and bruised, I am propped on feather pillows,
a chorus of nurses humming along with a string quartet.
They feed me morsels of freshwater mollusks by hand
and when I try to speak, my mouth snaps shut.

The room goes quiet except for the dancing of toddlers
in the amniotic kiddie pool. My palm opens to reveal her:

a single rotating pearl

which the nurses whisk away for cleaning.
The room erupts in applause–even the one-armed janitor
claps hand to blue-jeaned thigh. I try to bow

but the doctor waves me down, snips the single red thread
emerging from my feathers.

Someone makes a ring of her which I wear on my right hand,
my highest and holiest creation perched
on telephone-wire bones.