Baklava
By Mary Robinson

Three parts water and one dough is what the blueprint says makes a woman swell. No wonder he always turns into a cannibal when he is around us. Chunk after chunk he bites into my tissue and rouses you from slow tempo naps that soften you for entry into the mortal maize. Dark syrup drops inside of us creating a web of filo around my heart. In an instant you tap dancing in jerk like motions around the rim of my stomach lining causes my baby toes to swerve. Particles flake in a mucus whirlpool covering you from North to South. Let me just tell you that your attendance inside me made me drop in front of K-Mart the other night next to the cherry motorized swaying electric horse. Waning downward towards aisle one, all that ever became visible was my outer shell frozen and my inner searing against my sides Your father is already afraid that he will walk into your bedroom and find you blue. Strangers circle around me on the street speaking street slang. Five hundred grams of filo, three hundred grams of butter unsalted, two chopped walnuts, five grams of sugar, one litre of water, lemon juice, and one hour of darkness with a Sultan have all been fed into this woman's lower section to ferment in to a lovely flaky circle that her husband wishes to eat. Did you know that some mothers eat their little ones stillborn? Tip the syrup up and down you and you might make a delectable desert, good enough for say a glass case in a diner. You know those synthetic deserts. Not enough time has passed for me to accept your added weight to my frame. Distorting the dough like texture of my sides to play with you in the nighttime when the volume from the local news makes me ill to think your ears are partial to it. Gram after gram after gram you subside into me creating attachment. Imagining you suffocating in pure delight inside me. Live cushion in my stomach sprinkled with more life each unnatural minute. Does it feel like you are in mucus covered screened in porch? With only me as your exit? Baklava, Baklava, Baklava - that's all he ever wants to eat when we go into the city. The dough is rising every day. Last bedtime a bite out of myself seemed feasible because of those old elementary gymnastics days. Stretching down to maul my side, I had an epiphany. Diamond shapes of filo were floating all around inside of me and I saw you inside the filo watching the butter melt down my larynx. Perhaps your father, the Sultan Mehmet of the Ottoman Empire, would feel more inclined to show you deer hunting than this woman. Allow yourself the pleasure of not knowing about death before life even began for you. The hours of daylight bare as glass, the day the Sultan avowed that he was your papa. Parked inside the palace with an ashen linen robe and brunette skin, he drafted me into him as if he had just returned from combat. Days from now he can utter to your boyish spirit all of the battles that pirouette within his head. Once he told me that he chopped a man's head off with an ax while the man was singing in Arabic fondling a book. Sit down and listen when he talks to you because before him, no man could tell what was in my brain. The chaotic mess of femininity transposed from moment to moment. Losing myself in what females are supposed to lose themselves in was never magnetizing. As I sit here in the restaurant waiting to order my desert, a woman turns to me to reach out and grab my belly. Emotions of rage fluster me right out of the booth and into the men's room. Barely noticed the title on the door with the little man. Heart racing rabid, I lean against the stall and swallow the acid drivel that formed inside my mouth. Tasted like mucus in ways that would have earlier made me sick, now they make me deranged yet euphoric. Are you ready to swim out of me? Tasting the fluids of this female. Closer to drowning in life's dough. See it before you come, a yellow green mucus covered pool drowning you of everything inside of me. Vortexes of gore mottling the white washed walls and floor. Your father in his robe tattering over a Cuban and drunk with a woman's seasickness. Mama wrapped in nature-loving bloodshed alone with you in her flippers. Don't think the notion of chewing on you has been swept from my upper story. Perhaps I might sell you at a flea market like some turquoise vase. Deep down it's true that divisions of me will die when you are born. You signal my finale as mouth-watering livestock. Thank you. It has often been said that you make me look like a fetching piece of Baklava...