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Jamie Lynn Buehner

Caesarean

Every night I pass soapy fingers quickly over the cut,
small rope of proof and remembrance of being bed –
wheeled in my special hat to the theater
in summer

at what was normally happy hour time,
thinking “wow, they are good” as though
not running me into walls was a good sign
everything would go smoothly.

It took the tone of a comic strip:
the anesthesiologist’s blabbing about Florida
and how I’d still be able to wear a bikini
in a screamy font,

my husband ready to be blown away
telling me what he knew about Caesareans
and how they had to do it in a certain amount of time
written out in dandelion fuzz.

The pregnant woman on the tram rubbing
the belly now about to be sliced
reading A True Batman Tale
had been me

on my way to acupuncture,
not looking at the stops because mine
was the very last,
what bliss.

They pulled her out wiggling and offered me
a glimpse quick as a cane
dragging someone foul off stage,
but I saw her face

and felt her warm weight
in a scratchy yellow towel
that felt like it’d been line-dried,
my beautiful, horizontal,

clay-colored daughter.

Jamie Lynn Buehner is the author of Dessert Poems (Binge Press, 2012). Her recent work appears in pioneertown., Sleet Magazine, The Midwest Quarterly, and the Wisconsin Review. She lives in Germany.
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