Stabilizing the Libido:
What They Call It Now

Angela Consolo Mankiewicz

She is silent now,
kewpie-doll lips
pressed lightly, now.

Whites of golden eyes,
round as new pennies,
shine back unabsorbed gloss;

those golden eyes
still stunned by the pincers
clipping off a morsel
of baby-flesh
as if a defect, an alien growth,
a flaw of design,
dropped into stainless steel
with a squint of blood
by a nunned,  moon-faced matron
encircled by like faces
whose genital flaws scarred over
lifetimes ago.

This lifetime is in her mother’s arms again,
wrapping her warm again; her mother,
who will dab away the wet left on her cheeks,
one with a miniature mole.

She is 9 months old.
Not quite a beauty
yet more beautiful now,
unburdened of desire.

Will they, I wonder, save
the morsel for her husband?
As talisman,  as proof?
Will it be revered like a relic,
placed on a pedestal in the home
for her sons and daughters to emulate,
this flaw of divine design?

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