Frances Nagle
One in Twelve Thousand
Humbling work;
doctors are not good at saying
I don't know.
We are a team. Cross-discipline
for this demands expertise
on the endocrine system and the waterworks,
as well as, of course, the reproductive organs.
And the mind.
Then there's myself.
Into our hands is placed a perfect newborn.
We examine it, all of us,
even the psychologist,
and would give a ransom to take a time-machine
into the future and ask this baby
to tell us its gender.
Instead we weigh up the evidence - so slight -
and plump: This is a girl, we say, or This is a boy.
At which point I take up my knife.
Most times we get it right.
The hardest thing is waiting years and years
before we know.
And each time they hand me another perfect child
I wish he or she was living in the kind of world
where we could wait and see.
magazine list
- Features
- zines
- 10th Muse
- 14
- Acumen
- Agenda
- Ambit
- Angel Exhaust
- ARTEMISpoetry
- Atlas
- Blithe Spirit
- Borderlines
- Brando's hat
- Brittle Star
- Candelabrum
- Cannon's Mouth, The
- Chroma
- Coffee House, The
- Dream Catcher
- Equinox
- Erbacce
- Fabric
- Fire
- Floating Bear, The
- French Literary Review, The
- Frogmore Papers, The
- Global Tapestry
- Grosseteste Review
- Homeless Diamonds
- Interpreter's House, The
- Iota
- Journal, The
- Lamport Court
- London Magazine, The
- Magma
- Matchbox
- Matter
- Modern Poetry in Translation
- Monkey Kettle
- Moodswing
- Neon Highway
- New Welsh Review
- North, The
- Oasis
- Obsessed with pipework
- Orbis
- Oxford Poetry
- Painted, spoken
- Paper, The
- Pen Pusher Magazine
- Poetry Cornwall
- Poetry London
- Poetry London (1951)
- Poetry Nation
- Poetry Review, The
- Poetry Salzburg Review
- Poetry Scotland
- Poetry Wales
- Private Tutor
- Purple Patch
- Quarto
- Rain Dog
- Reach Poetry
- Review, The
- Rialto, The
- Second Aeon
- Seventh Quarry, The
- Shearsman
- Smiths Knoll
- Smoke
- South
- Staple
- Strange Faeces
- Tabla Book of New Verse, The
- Thumbscrew
- Tolling Elves
- Ugly Tree, The
- Weyfarers
- Wolf, The
- Yellow Crane, The