Their white within the Inner Harbor’s
tea-colored water
first tricks me into seeing
them as trash. They’re floating
too-elegantly for me to mistake it twice.
The biped in me can’t help but admire the grace
of their jellied swimming.
To swim, I’ll swim across days,
up coastlines, to new cities, and memories.
There are fetal skeletons
at the Mütter, and they’re arranged in the display
case according to height. The boy
at the right end’s skull, slightly flattened
makes him look awkward and alien.
I’d feel like a monster to look at him,
and her, and her, and him, each of them,
these children who never took a step, too clinically,
and as my eyes move between their tiny
toes, they move closer to me than any jelly,
no matter how pretty,
could.
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