Hang on Saint Christopher.

Mumsa, what can I say?

After all this time, what good could it possibly do?

I am a sorry one – this much is by now beyond all dispute.

But more than the rest,

the thing that makes me most sorry

is that I didn’t just let you have

your old Saint Christopher…

Mumsa was an excellent Catholic.

Very excellent, very Catholic.

Carried rosary beads around with her like folks today’ll carry cell phones

(& praying while driving is as dangerous as drunken wheelies)

That woman went to church constantly, for all of the appropriate

Holy Days of Obligation.

She believed in the power of the holy and unbroken hymen of the Blesséd Mother.

& most of all, Mumsa believed in the power that came

from prayer

especially when those prayers were directed

at or around one Saint Christopher

who would intercede on her behalf

any ole time of day or night.

She kept a relic around her neck

purporting to be the toe of Saint Christopher hisself-

the big toe of his left foot, to be precise.

There was even a little snag of nail on there.

& she’d wear this thing on a string

around her neck

& rub it furiously while she’d pray

when she was having any one of the daily problems that come along in life…

Oh! How Mumsa swore by that toe!

You remember when Aunt Maxine got her skin cancer that summer

& then somehow seemed to get over it overnight?

That was Christopher!

When Cousin Audrey got knocked up by that Negro kid

but lo & behold the half-breed was born dead,

thus saving Audrey (& the whole family) from a life of pain & shame?

Christopher again, obviously!

But me? Moi’?

Ungrateful & blasphemous cur that I am

- or was, at any rate –

I couldn’t just let it be

I had to kill what meant the most

to those who loved me

I was 16,

& I felt slighted @ some petty trifle

Could be that Mumsa wouldn’t let me go to a party,

Who knows what it was?

(& what could it possibly matter now?)

But I struck back with all that I had
I said, //Saint Chris never was!
Even the Pope says so!\\
Then I went to the shelf
& took out the World Book Encyclopedia
which knew everything there was to know

I showed her:

since 1969:

No Chris.

Ergo, no Chris’ toe.

Why,

Mumsa’s eyes…

they faded right then & there.

She took that toe

which had gotten a little green, frankly

& a little worn out from all

that rubbing & all that praying & so forth

She took that toe & gave it

one last,

long stare,

and she

- //EWWWW!\\ -

dropped it.

Oh Mumsa,

why couldn’t I just have let you

have your dear Saint Christopher?

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.