An Old Woman Cooking Eggs
Diego Valazquez 

The boy waits, ladle in hand,
his gaze fastened to two eggs
poaching in the old woman’s red
clay bowl, but she isn’t doling out
anything, her gaze roaming past what can easily
be seen, even as the fingers of her right hand
elegantly grip her wooden spoon, angled
toward the eggs, offering the possibility
of cradling them free. Her spoon angled
the same way the sonogram technician
held her all-seeing wand yesterday, gliding it
through and through the clear gel she’d squeezed
over my right breast, running the wand’s eyeball
up from my ribs, in from my armpit, down
from my collarbone, all the while looking
without speaking at the black and white
layers of sediment that were part of me,
but a mathematical equation I had no
hope to solve. With what would she fill
my ladle and send me home?