Egg, Potato, Stone

In the photo, ten of them.
Mottled, trailing bracken, huddled
on a parched, cracked backdrop
gray as when the indecisive sky

changes with each blink: now
shades of winter-before-snowfall
now dawn-following-the-illness.
They could be anything. Flat

landscape of a blank doll face.
Emotionally cryptic as a clown.
If they are eggs, they are not
mine. They are eggs

of the barren, eggs of women
whose wombs split in childbirth.
Seamless eggs of a cracked future.
Shake them. Hear

their viscous potential.
If they are potatoes, let them be firm
and smooth as a hungry child’s
swollen belly. Weigh them

in your palm: the heft of pestilence
inversely proportional
to the buoyancy of gluttony.
If they be stone, Lord,

let them be porous, so tears
may flow right through them.
Dense, heavy moons.
Tiny, stillborn moons.