I look for a dark line rising up from my pelvis to my breasts,
for any sign of you holier than the swelling. Not the weight of you, it isn’t enough.
It’s the end of the worst for us, Gemini Baby.
We’re coming up on 12 weeks—that long exhale.
Soon, an ultrasound will confirm the due date.
But I am impatient. Has this been too easy? Hardly any sickness
and no blood—not even to mark your arrival.
You are now a lime. Almost plum. Tail-less, you shed the webs
between your fingers and toes. You breathe!
You are still see-through. Glass Lime Baby, we wonder
if there might be two of you. Tart-sweet
citrus baby/ies, are there two heads? You are a Gemini. We hope for two.
I want my dreams to tell me, but I can only dream of the end of the world.
Black Gemini Baby/ies, it is a broken window world.
I step on its glass again and again in my sleep.
You are growing your genitalia. I’m sorry. Baby They.
Know that, for me, it doesn’t make you. I won’t let it unmake you.
I don’t want to know.
Gender Neutral Baby, what is there to reveal?
We still hold you close to our chests. Not quite a bluff baby,
it has been an easy first trimester. You grow sweet as the sugar cane
I will teach you to gnaw at the root.
But it has not been easy around us, our one body.
One man takes a knee for you, the rest would hang you.
There have been 307 mass shootings in the 311 days of this year.
How can I explain this, Mass shooting? How can I keep the white men from you?
Bilingual Black Baby. Is that duality already enough?
Immigrant mother, father on parole. All you will know is impossible love.
I will invoke the ancestors, call upon the healer-women
as I lower myself into the tub. A water birth to open the channel.
I pray a salt-rub rosary for my Great-Grandmother to visit us.
To guide the midwives’ hands. She had a tonic for everything.
I rub a poultice across my belly. Against stretch marks and early birth.
Against whiteness, against racism’s outstretched hands,
waiting to catch you as I squat with the doula.
I am not blasphemous enough to hope for an easy birth.
There is already so much caught in my throat, and none of it feels like knowledge.
I want to call you Abelito, son of Mother Eve, first witch.
First woman to throw her man away.
How will we tend this garden, Gemini Baby?
It is a garden, still, even as we find bullets with our trowels.
We will unearth and lift high the skulls of our people.
Mine, a caravan moving like a dream in the desert. Blooming from spilled canteens.
Your father’s, Black boys and men with their hands up, their backs turned,
falling to the ground. But I will teach you the resurrection spell.
It’s simpler than it seems: we say their names.
We unbury, bless and till the earth. We whisper in thanks to any green thing.
We must live here, Gemini Baby. We must ground
our feet in this soil, stained as it is with our blood.
We wear it in defiance, for protection.
You will come with spring.
You will be like a spring.
Gemini Baby
