Division of Labor

At least you had a mother. All four of mine
denied responsibility. All four denied
maternity. The sensibly-shoed girlnextdoor
firstwife of my selfmade
millionaire sperm-parent: my
contracting-mother. The chesty blonde neo-Aryan
Ivyleague Phi Beta Kappa who skipped Con-law
to mine her uterus for its haploid yolk-sacs; my
egg mother. The highschoodropout daytime
soapaholic who
triple-trimester-timeshared her belly
with my wormfishchildlike zygote: my
gestation-mother. And last,
the onetime stripper trophywife with the
silicon-valley for
cleavage: my
custodial-mother.
What, with a post-restante
prenatality, an au pair roulette-wheel
upbringing with a
UN's-worth of nationalities, and
the synthetic mother's-milk, it's
as if nothing in my life isn't
artificial, isn't queer as having a
hypodermic needle for a sex-partner.

I spent my formative years with
laboratory mice wearing human ears on their backs:
among french fries classified
technically by FDA as a natural
insecticide: where cornfields grew human
antibodies and Monsanto implanted patented
Terminator sterility into next-generation
seed.

Is there something wrong
with me that I wanted
a mother's love and not just
a fertility protocol and a sequence
of genes? That I resent being conceived by
the division of labor? That I
need something more than
things to eat that have been -- "linked to"
items that were once
food? That I suspect these biotech
improvements have less to do with
feeding the hungry than
digesting their souls into intellectual
property.

Only Hallmark loves me
on mother's day.
No one's ever even bothered
to hate me. It's like I'm a jigsaw puzzle of a
Jackson Pollock and it doesn't matter
how, or when, or even if
the pieces ever fit
together, the box makes it clear:
some assembly required.

Why should you, why should anyone
care about me, this handful of nucleotides
grown on a culture medium of
fee-for-service medicine and
recombinant genetic pride? When three-fifths
patented, the motherless mammal leaves
a five-fifths hole, in the for-profit
subsidiary, replacing
a once human
soul?