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The Stars—They Shine Just for Us

Jill Michelle

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Mission Impossible was the movie your dad and I watched the

Evening before your birth, bars of its theme song, labor’s

Anthem: dun, dun, dun, dun, dun-nun, a rhythmic hum beneath

Nurse Peggy’s pink-capped reminders to breathe while she

Deciphers the strength of your engine song heartbeat, reads

Your stress levels scratched out in ink on thin white strips as

On and on, the Pitocin drips. The dun, dun, dun, dun, dun-nun

Underneath, braided in between the growing contractions’

Violent grip, ice chips, pleas, the sweet needle-prick of the

Epidural, spinal-blocked relief. Through it all, the six syllables

Repeat: dun, dun, dun, dun, dun-nun, mantra of your coming, cervix

Song that faces the doctor’s dilation checks, dirge dedicated to the

Undoing of Catholic modesty. The minutes between contractions

Shrink, hands of the black and white clock tick-tocking seconds

To hours until the OB’s order to me: Push! Then to your father,

His color drained in prelude to a faint: On the floor—knees up! It

Echoes: dun, dun, dun, dun, dun-nun, a refrain as more medical staff

Worm past, faces masked, a troop of blue-draped angels hovering

Over us. A hymn now, it loops, runs until the final slice of knife,

Record spun until 3:57 when you fall to Earth, late afternoon sun

Lighting up the Plexiglas crib, my first vision of you: downy limbs

Dancing madly, tapping out all of our impossibles to come.

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Playlist song: Space, “Me and You Versus the World”

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Jill Michelle‘s honors include a Best of the Net nomination for the title poem of her collection, Underwater (Riot in Your Throat, 2025), and the 2023 NORward Prize. Her latest poems are forthcoming in Black Coffee Review, Lips Poetry Magazine, Poemeleon and Sheila-Na-Gig. She teaches at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida.

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