Unloveable baby wants back in.
Unloveable baby screams colic; her heart stillborn, premature, heaving. Unloveable baby born wrong. Fat hands look for mom and wriggle from the plastic holes. Unloveable baby’s feet take off when doctor’s not looking. She gets as far as the front desk nurse’s TV, then stops to see who’s chasing. Baby needs her boy. Baby needs her birth-warden, needs to learn the language that admits her to the world of full-grown kids, needs the right words that get her carried from the low-lit backseat of the car and tucked into bed up the wooden stairs.
Unloveable baby’s breath shallows in the incubator, mom’s head lazy and slow and lulling in the room over. Baby dreams of fists in sleep-spelling auburn tufts that fall from mom’s head. Baby drifts to hot cheek pecks, arm squeezes, to the bony part of the ankle that cuts in and itches when lying intertwined together.
Mich Maliszewska (she/her) is a fourth year OCAD Illustration major and Creative Writing minor, and a debuting writer and comics artist. Her work is interested in archiving the internal changes one goes through at certain life stages and the connection between identity and city, mainly working with auto-fictional and autobiographical comics, illustration, and prose.