Rachel Zucker The Dread of the Power of the Instincts The good enough mother dreams of arson and writes: "noodles: please warm." The listening device insists but the child, coughing, doesn't cry—shifts, shifts, turns over. On the ultrasound-scan I looked porous: sponge around the blinking fact of fetus and am still unfinished. To say the form is organic is to say nothing. This suffering,               boredom. A flawless beauty this nurture cuts and how the good enough mother smoothes and files her patience. How perfect, look, long suffering they say, and know nothing. Kindle, smolder, flame, consume. Kindle, smolder, use. I put out hors d'oeuvres, some of them half-frozen. No Atmosphere but Ice in My Deep Craters The bulge-side oceans quiver and lean. The days seem long, even in winter. Run it off trollipe, say the quadriceps, but when calcium floods the synapse I pulse, move, breathe. My body has intentions my mind can't master. The heart has nothing to do with it. Aloof to lipids and casual enzymes, cardiac muscle keeps the status quo going. Autography 4 During this time people protested. I didn't though I never for one moment was for it. And people bought supplies and became political but I didn't though I never for one moment doubted these necessities. A poet acquaintance had a baby. I saw her and the baby—they'd just been at a protest—and felt like I'd never had a baby despite my two boys. I stopped reading newspapers except about science and stopped the TV news though poets were at protests and writing blogs and someone asked me how I could write such abstract lyrics at a time like this and I looked at him and wondered what it felt like to write a poem. Pregnant women looked freakish to me, like costumes or experiments. On my way to the day care I looked at the big bellied women or new mothers with strollers and wondered what was it like to push a baby out of your body. Last night as I gathered my little son out of the bath into a green towel—clean, smooth, slippery, sleepy—I wondered what that was like. Rachel Zucker is the author of The Last Clear Narrative and Eating in the Underworld. Her poems have appeared in various journals including APR, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Fence and Volt as well as in the anthology Best American Poetry 2001. She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.