On his desk, coiled against a fragment
of uterine wall, the fetus floated
in a mason jar, pale thumb raised
to its voiceless straw of neck.
Shaken from moth-balled sleep,
my father’s lab coat—starched, pressed,
lily-white—sloped across his shoulders
behind the Underwood. A blank
sheet waited for letters to pound
through carbon: malignant, benign,
malignant, malignant, benign.

Pipette-thin, barely nine,
I crossed the doorway. No sound
but the shuffle of patent shoes on tile.
Clicking against the microscope,
his ice-cube lenses magnified
that other universe—berry-stained

cells congealed into rocks, ringlets,
ferns unfurled, moon craters.
Curled amidst books and paper,
I became infinitesimal, a tight fist
of fire and constellations, no larger
than a dust mote on the camera lens
he polished with a scrap of chamois
before peering into the deep
rivers of a heart pinned open.