Fetuses! Stillborns! Cast-Offs!

In the old days,
my sisters & I
(& there were many of us) (more than you could count on all your clubbed fingers & all your hammer toes) (tho the # varied some w/ the season & sometimes I believe there to have been a fake an interloper a cuckoo - or maybe 3 - amongst us at any given time)

my sisters & I,
we would wait
& we’d be very quiet
w/ our ears peeled for the clop-clop-clop
& for the call we’d come to know so well.

The man in the black carriage
coming on down the alley.

Shouting,
//Fetuses! Stillborns! Cast-offs!
$5 per! $5 per!\\

In the old days,
$5 was a lot of money, you see
& it would have been maybe a week & a ½
since any of us had ate a full meal
or been able to afford fresh porn
or Windex.

But even a cockroach can live for months just on the glue on the back of a postage stamp.

So we’d eat our glue
& we’d bide our time
& we’d wait for Amnio Baba to return
coming on down the alley.
In the old days.

//Fetuses! Stillborns! Cast-offs!\\
//Fetuses! Stillborns! Cast-offs!\\

In the old days,
my sisters & I
we’d squeal & we’d run,
our hearts all a’pitter patter,
dreaming of what we’d buy w/ that $5
or if it had been an exceptionally
hella strange quarter
maybe $10.

Selling to Amnio Baba
our latest abortions
maybe still twitching
or maybe already drifting
in formaldehyde.

It varied a lot.

Sometimes a sister
would get impatient
would get greedy,
jump the gun,
& try to pawn off an embryo
hardly more than a blastocyst, really.

But Amnio Baba was no fool.
Amnio Baba, he knew.
He’d been at this game for years by then.

& even his horse would turn up its nose at such fare.

& Amnio Baba would take a gander
@ this simple collection of cells
posing as a fetus
& then Amnio Baba would shout:

//What is it that you take me for, you thieving pre-teen fraud?
& how dare you run out here
& try to pass off this…
this zygotic monstrosity
as a fetus!!
Why, I have ½ a mind to skip this house entirely
next go-round!\\

//& then you & all your bloody sisters
can go & try
to sell off your oozing miscarriages
to some hackneyed carnie somewhere
@ maybe ½ the price & twice the bother.
I warn you, girl: I have done it before.\\

Then he’d spit
& give the errant (maybe) sister in question 50 cents for the embryo anyway.

But still…

That night we’d eat well
& go to sleep w/ our bellies full
of potato salad instead of babies
for a change.

In the old days,
it never occurred to us
while pocketing all those $5 bills
to ever even wonder
let alone to ask
Amnio Baba
where it was he rolled off to
in his black horse-drawn carriage
w/ all those withered abortions.