the children were surprisingly calm. Later I’d learn
what my own child would accept, grown used
to our nomadic life, but that was years away. Barely
a person at two weeks, unlike me, she couldn’t focus
on the men shuffling to the window to murmur words
like cohabitate instead of what I would say,
lived with, paternity instead of father. I understood
the men used legal rather than familial words
because we were in an open-plan, echoing room
that wasn’t about families at all. I too had come
to make a declaration, that my baby was mine alone.
At my turn, the clerk asked if I had proof, and I looked
down at the fold of my child’s mouth, her animal
hands. I felt the diaper that held together my body,
ripped open not long before—I could hardly walk—
but maybe that only proved, like her birth certificate,
that I was her mother. You can’t prove a negative,
I wanted to say, but the nurse taking blood
in the corner of the room wanted that, the man
with his sleeve rolled up wanted it too. I see a father
listed, the clerk said, and told me a French name,
man piloting a swamp boat through my imagination.
A stranger who, peering under our car seat bonnet,
would be as confused as I am at how the State of Florida
found a husband for me. Clerical error of a man.
In response, I supplied the Latinate words that conjured
my baby, artificial insemination, for all to hear,
handing over the letter I asked my doctor to write.
My word, I had to do that, get a letter like that.
I’ve learned I can’t tell people what they don’t
already believe, but I fought for that blank space.
This isn’t a confession but the facts that surround us,
as everyone has, and once my child’s fake father was gone,
I thanked the clerk and ran through the parking lot,
through the gathered, hissing geese. I drove home,
opened my shirt, and on that spring day, fed my child.