Baby Dream #15: The Minor Mutation
Katie Manning
You know babies change in the womb—
from tadpole
to gerbil
to tiny human—
somehow yours kept changing.
Look at the screen: see
the lengthened neck,
lengthened legs,
hardening hooves.
Sometimes these things happen.
The good news is
the baby is healthy.
It won’t come out for an extra year
and three months,
so you can enjoy pregnancy even more.
The bad news is
your newborn will be at least
five feet tall.
When you go into labor, you will need
to stand on a high place
and let the baby ease its long way out,
fall hard to the floor,
leave your body
completely
empty.
from tadpole
to gerbil
to tiny human—
somehow yours kept changing.
Look at the screen: see
the lengthened neck,
lengthened legs,
hardening hooves.
Sometimes these things happen.
The good news is
the baby is healthy.
It won’t come out for an extra year
and three months,
so you can enjoy pregnancy even more.
The bad news is
your newborn will be at least
five feet tall.
When you go into labor, you will need
to stand on a high place
and let the baby ease its long way out,
fall hard to the floor,
leave your body
completely
empty.
Listen to Katie read the poem here:
Working notes
“Baby Dream #15: The Minor Mutation” is part of a sequence of poems that are based on real dreams that I had before, during, and after pregnancy. I was stunned that these strange dreams were so vivid, and it isn’t hard to see how they express my anxieties about growing a new human. I found it interesting that so many of these dreams involved animals—birds, dogs, fish, ants, etc. This dream about the baby becoming a giraffe is one of the strangest and one of my very favorites.
About the author
Katie Manning is the author of three poetry chapbooks: The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman (Point Loma Press, 2013), Tea with Ezra (Boneset Books, 2013), and I Awake in My Womb (Yellow Flag Press, 2013). Her poems have been published in New Letters, PANK, Poet Lore, and So to Speak, among many other journals and anthologies. She is an Assistant Professor of English at Azusa Pacific University. Find her online at www.katiemanningpoet.com