2 Poems

did you know there’s a species

of male fruit bat that lactates

so the female doesn’t grow

too heavy with milk to fly,

or that flamingos agree on a nesting

site together and equally share

in their eggs’ incubation time;

did you know my father left

a few days after I was cut into the world,

that my mother healed alone while he

was playing keeper at a soccer tournament,

or that my husband was held by his neck

up a wall as a child for being a child,

his father a handsome, devout, christian man.

the male midwife toad gestates

beneath the skin of his back legs,

and others carry offspring, instead,

in the wet of their mouths;

how hard it must be for the busy

new father not to swallow

his eager little tadpoles whole.