Erin Vachon
I tell my friends it will get bad, then better. Soon. A timeline sketch. Summer, then. We will conquer. At protests, we flex such chants into religion. I. I. Believe. Believe. That We. That We. Will Win. Will Win. Then I weave sidewalks to my car hidden within the mall parking lot, and I’m shocked back to late-stage capitalism. More people in the Apple store than were marching. Buying new iPhone chargers. Anyhow.
My friends weren’t at the protest or mall in any case, first-time parents. Raising an infant. His name, coined after a bird, word meaning druid. A magus avium: bird sorcerer. There is magic in believing we’ll soar through this. You ask me what I want your child to call me once he starts talking. Not aunt. Not uncle. Aun-cle, maybe? I say, Ent. Like the trees in The Lord of the Rings. Druids do befriend oaks and maples.
Before the baby arrived, your wife came down with COVID. You were scared to suffer the hospital birth class alone, a presentation in all-day PowerPoint. Slide after slide of liquid and discharge. White, pink. Something pale on the blue spectrum. Your convex belly, now alien. I whispered, You’re really going to do this? As if you had another option, eight months in. Your child, a renter inside a bloody studio apartment. A mandatory eviction, about to bust the hell out.
We toured the birth rooms in the afternoon and found baths with high-speed jets. Flatscreen televisions. But such violences cannot be cushioned. My news feeds show masked men dragging another man out of his home in Minneapolis, half-dressed. All of the ICE agents, unholstered. The man, swaddled in a blanket, newborn naked. The wrong guy, they’ll say later. But there’s no retracting icy metal touching bare skin.
You and I ate in the hospital cafeteria on break from the slideshow of ugly-baby-photos– not babies that are ugly, but the ugly situations that babies are put in. We talked to this guy and his wife, also pregnant. His face looked familar. Then I knew him. A church boy, from when I was young. You and his wife swapped medical histories over overpriced paninis, while I said, Jon? Are you really here right now? Felt the need to map his face for memory’s sake to locate the child within. His wife, a punk-pink she/they wearing a maternity shirt in leopard. He said he never thought he would have kids, at his age now, and I was conscious that I was even older.
Back in the classroom to screen the B-roll of the pelvic floor horror show, the instructor noted one couple missing. Needed to proceed anyhow. A door opened. And the guy from the lost couple ducked his head in. He said, My wife and I really enjoyed this class. 10/10 Yelp review. Super helpful. I almost told you those two must be grossed out too, and what chumps they were, backing out like cowards. As if I wasn’t Clockwork Oranging myself through the infant diagnostics of weird skin rashes, all in the name of friendship. Instead I listened, which is often better in these instances. The guy delivered, said, My wife’s water just broke on break. Actually she’s two floors up now. Hooray! Room-wide elation. But now you’re really there, suddenly, and I realize you have a whole fucking person inside you. Sure, I knew, but now I know. I say, It could happen at anytime now. Your smile spreads the wingspan of a wren, brown-feathered.
I tell you things will get better, and today your baby’s first tooth pokes through the gum. He keeps gnawing on my index finger. Wailing like a demon, grinning, rolling his head over your belly, as if he wants to get back in there. I don’t blame him. It’s the first pain he’s really felt, betrayed from within. We’re all infants when the first tooth pokes through. Over a thousand miles away in Minnesota, ICE kidnaps a five-year-old boy and trafficks him. Baby blue bunny hat stitched with sad eyes. His own, wet and innocent. A full day, his family can’t locate him. We need sharp incisors to gnaw through the meat of this mess, unflinching. One child means no less than any other. Today on my iPhone there’s a warning against exploding trees in Minnesota, temperature dropping to deep freeze, too fast. Those who know trees know. The social feeds joke, The Ents are going to war. I tell you I believe that we will win and I mean: we will protect the children. Love is more deep-rooted than hate–let’s bank on this. The truth is we’re birthing a revolution. I mean: hold on, dear friend, we’re really going through this.
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Erin Vachon is the Senior Reviews Editor at SmokeLong Quarterly and the Multigenre + Chapbook Editor for Split/Lip Press. They are on the English Department Adjunct Faculty at Rhode Island College and live outside Providence, Rhode Island.