Jacqui Zeng: Undo All Her Work
Photo: Joanna C. Valente
Sonogram
Before my head blooms wide between the gates of her pelvis demanding the scalpel draw its thin red finish line below her belly
and before the fine powder that separates pairs of latex gloves dusts my crown, long before that day, they are nesting.
My pregnant mother and yet-to-be father on hands and knees
in the mudroom, pressing vinyl flooring over dust-dappled concrete.
Her belly brushing the spot where I will fall, when I’m nine, dash my head against green vines patterned across the floor.
Unwittingly, they slick the place where the office chair will skid
out from under me. They smooth the bubbles out, prepare a landing.
Vinyl hushes against plaster walls and my parents rise on sore ankles, flex their wrists. My morning-sick mother attempts to straighten
the pale green tines of their dishwasher.
One day I will crooken those tines, undo all her work
to accommodate the largess of casserole dishes, ceramic mugs with each handle facing south.
Their first bed is a mattress on the attic floor. Years later I will wriggle nightly between them,
ask to be held until the shadows of passing cars
fade into daybreak. But not yet. Now the bed is just for them.
My father, wrists plastered in wallpaper paste,
tears wood panels off the living room walls, exposing
white plaster I will one day scribble with crayons named “Goldenrod” and “Inchworm.” My parents
are a sonogram, fuzzy picture of what could be headed straight into what will be — blue hairnet,
cotton gown, epidural needle with upticked tip, blossom and scalpel and many gloved hands.
Jacqui Zeng is a poet from the Chicago suburbs. Her poems appear in Aquifer (Florida Review Online), Natural Bridge, and Mid-American, among others. She received her MFA from Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She is currently a social media editor for Tinderbox Poetry Journal.
