Reversal

By K.E. McCoy

When they deliver
this perfect creature
from the freezer
into your strange waiting arms
for you to burn
your lips
against his
tiny
frosty
forehead

Hoping
that the warmth
of your breath,
like him, still fresh
from its little life within you,
doesn’t resolve
his too-solid flesh
into a dew

Then tell me
you too
would not
unhinge your jaw
to swallow him whole

Waiting
like a
kick-counting Cronos
on a stone’s
promise

Praying
for the knife
of a crone-seeking
woodsman

perhaps
a god

For
anything
but to walk away
empty

Tell me:
wouldn’t
you too
wish
your body
into a
chrysalis?

---

K.E. McCoy’s work has been published in Remington Review, Riverbed Review, Eunoia Review, and Glow in the Woods. This poem is about the death of her first son, as a newborn. She lives with her husband and two children in Wisconsin.