Katie Bickham
How Long Does it Take to Make Nine People?
Do we count the sex? The thrills and come-cries
and the counting days and blue lines,
maybe a miscarriage, maybe a fluke or two
before we got all nine here at once?
We should count the nipples, cracked and still
produced at every nighttime whine, the seconds
ticking down on microwaves as fathers
warmed the milk and shared the load.
We should count the teeth.
The lost ones under pillows, the crumpled bills
that paid for them, the ones that grew back in,
the wisdom teeth, the wisdom it all took.
The three-two-one before his mother watched
him drop, gripping the rollercoaster’s hand bar,
before her father lit the bottle rocket on the 4th,
before the boy closed his eyes and jumped into the deep end.
I like to think how long it took to ferment the grapes
the barley, hops to make the drinks that were their firsts,
the hundreds of years it took the acorns to make trees
that shaded their yards, that freckled them with leaves.
It takes ten thousand years to weave the blanket
of a soul, much less of nine. Imagine the billions
of rolls of the dice for the lucky break of an ancestor, a cell,
an egg, a ship, a roll in the hay, a meeting in the hall.
How long does it take to make nine people?
It doesn’t matter. Because no one was keeping count.
Because no one can remake them. Because it took less
than a minute to kill them all.
Katie Bickham is the author of Mouths Open to Name Her (LSU Press, 2019) and The Belle Mar (Pleiades, 2015). Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review, Rattle, Pleiades, The Southern Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Bickham has won the Rattle Reader’s Choice Award, the Missouri Review Editor’s Prize, and The New Millennium Poetry Prize. She lives in Shreveport, La.
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