Vanessa Ogle

Mother of 0

If you add real to the Google search for newborn you get dolls,
pink dolls, white dolls, weighted dolls, dolls with bare feet, toes curled inward
so they’re always moving something, a twitch even in sleep. And isn’t it just like life 

that adding in the qualifier of real makes something not real—
false, imitation, our best attempt. I wanted to show him what a baby
would be like, covered in that pale slime I assume is from the vagina. 

Movies use docile 8-month-olds or dolls, anything but newborns. My mother
thinks Hollywood hospital scenes should use real babies,
weak-necked and wobbly. She wants cheeks with fingernail scratches. Real life. 

She’s a literalist who stays awake even when she snores, who remembers her surgery,
saying, I kept tapping my arm to let them know I was awake.
She heard them say she was under. 

Every choice always seems like the wrong one. On the bus today, I saw a mother
so patient with her child, the baby thinking every red sign was an apple
and I didn’t know which one I’d rather be, the one who knows someone is wrong

or the one who speaks without thought, only instinct.

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Vanessa Ogle is a poet, writer and educator. Her work has most recently appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, Insider and elsewhere. She received her MFA from Hunter College in 2020 and lives in Brooklyn, New York.