How To Have Your Baby and Eat It
Give birth. When the midwife’s back is turned, carefully snip a fresh hand from its wrist. You deserve it. If someone can pop in with a dish of salsa for dipping, better still.
While junior sucks ravenously at the breast, relieve him of a left leg. Rub generously with paprika and roast the limb in a blistering oven for a good three hours. Children are tougher than you think. Fail to fully tenderise and they will repeat on you for days.
To some, the nose is a snivelling mound of bone and gristle. To others, a delicacy. Suck it and see.
Contrary to popular opinion, the liver – pan fried, naturally – does not pair well with Chianti. One half of a Farley’s rusk dissolved in a small glass of milk provides the perfect complement for its textural silt.
Eyeballs. You either love ‘em or you hate ‘em (or so the saying goes). Learn to love them, unless you want to meet their gaze every time you come in for a hit of kid carpaccio.
When your sister comes over cooing, ooh I could just devour him, give her your hardest stare. You’re an adult now. You no longer have to share.
Shauna Robertson hails from the north-east of England and now lives in the south-west. Her poems have been performed by actors, displayed on buses, used to compose music, turned into comic art and made into short films. She has two chapbooks, Blueprints for a Minefield (Fair Acre Press, 2016) and Love Bites (Dancing Girl Press, forthcoming 2018). Shauna also writes for children and makes artwork.
andotherpoems.com 