Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Normal head shape and size

Ateret Haselkorn
Bay Area, California, United States

 

Photo by Karen Arnold. Source

My son is flying a rainbow
Kite. The streamers frame
The beach like a wedding canopy.
He runs.
His three-year old legs
Don’t know the meaning of “stroll.”

I recollect, years ago, the prenatal ultrasound.
The border of his skull,
The tiniest of incubators,
Stamped “HEAD,” measured,
Appraised as normal.

From where did this all emerge:
A love of water slides,
Of pitted black olives eaten off fingertips,
Of the color orange.
And a laugh that builds upon itself like a fractal.

I don’t know if his fetal images,
Tagged and numbered,
Showed a preset boundary or future.
But as I coil each kite streamer
Around my fingers,
Counting them slowly,
I remember that numbers are infinite.

 


 

ATERET HASELKORN writes fiction and poetry. She is the winner of the 2014 Annual Palo Alto Weekly Short Story Contest (adult category). Her work is forthcoming in the Journal of Emergency Nursing and has been published in CHEST Journal (American College of Chest Physicians), the Trouvaille Review, Lamplit Underground, Sixfold, Corvus Review, Fiction on the Web, Anti-Heroin Chic, Literally Stories, Scarlet Leaf Review, Mused Literary Review, and Page & Spine. She was a finalist in the 2020 “Science Me a Story” contest of the Society of Spanish Researchers in the United Kingdom. Author website. Twitter: @HealthyHalo1.

 

Summer 2021  |  Sections  |  Poetry

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