Arsenic Lobster poetry journal
Issue Eighteen
Winter 2008
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Before I Was Born
Kyle Hemmings

Mastodons thumped across the earth
King Ei brandished a sword
in the Garden of Ninevah,
winters were long, promised
a Black Death, corpses in the street.
Heathcliff wandered the windy moors
silent as his passion
for forbidden fruit.

Before I was born
there were no clocks

My mother told me how I began:
she enticed a man to dinner,
then later growing in her womb
through the rich walls of the uterus
I heard someone making a sound: Gravitas?
Preterm? Within the space between
nurses' shrieks, I was ejected
into a world of incubators and timed feedings.
From there my true personal history starts:
Forever I would be reaching out,
trying to grasp what I could never hold.

About Kyle Hemmings

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