what keeps me up at night

in 8th grade I’d binge-watched my best friend’s box set of Angel DVDs,
a questionable choice by a questioning tween who might’ve come out
sooner if they’d just watched Buffy first / maybe that’s the reason
the big bad of my nightmares wasn’t an unborn again ex-boyfriend
or the gentlemen but Cordelia’s demonic conception: uterus turned
hellmouth as if the VHS of childbirth we’d watched in health class didn’t
have us scared chaste, carbon-dated curriculum reducing the birds
and the bees to bananas in condoms and Baby Think It Overs^™ / see,
evil spawn aren’t much of a stretch when what you know of labour
and delivery is straight out of a Blockbuster: a whole lot of screaming
and foetuses slick with gore, still tethered to their human incubators |
luckily the nastiest girl in Sunnydale was spared that fate, sevenfold
pregnancy terminated along with the demon daddy-to-be (exorcisms
are easier to access than abortions, after all) until once again with feeling
our heroine’s infernally inseminated / I’ve watched as Xena and Scully
and Ripley have had their wombs taken over, pregnancy forced on them
by divine intervention, alien abduction, throbbing parasitic proboscises
and sleep a little easier with an IUD, polyethylene antenna embedded
in my uterine wall a ward against self-fulfilling prophecy: destiny-free.