Cocooning
Nancy Berg
You're fine, really,
but the small burrowing creature inside you
is trying to live in a hot cubbyhole
six and a half feet beneath the foundation
of your co-op.
Everything's OK, you guess,
except this burrowing animal
keeps trying to claw its way inside
the wombs of your lovers
who are men
and, as such, without wombs
but the burrowing creatures refuse to understand this.
Your life, it hisses, has been breathing into the microphone
for longer than you can remember,
and the tableaux series of you in most embarrassing moments
is painted in primary colors
on a caravan of 18 wheelers,
coming to a neighborhood near you.
"Feed me three or four down comforters,"
says the burrower.
"Feed me nine electric blankets.
Let me hang my cubist paintings,
all in earth tones,
on the wall."
Even so, it will contract you
to a dense black dot
beneath the shadow of your navel.
It will fold you in a closet
intermittently pumped with oxygen
by convoluted theories on a conspiracy of mule deer
and the nature of the spirit to betray, consume, and spit.
Your impulse will be to surrender,
but your mission will be to resist.