This Little Piggy
       

Like a cat lured by its tail,
my daughter doesn't yet know
her feet are hers. She chews
and slobbers on these strange orphans,
slaps them together
as a punished student would
chalkboard erasers.

In her crib, hands clasp feet
in a spire of unstable flesh,
then she plops to one side,
gives me an empty stare
through the bars as I kneel,
and I see clearly that the red
in my beard is the red in her curls

but also that my daughter
is not mine, that possession
is merely a pronoun or an apostrophe
in the sympathetic system of language,
that one day she will realize that her feet
conform to her will, her heart,
and she will walk away from me.

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Copyright © 2015 Adam Vines All rights reserved
from Southern Humanities Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission