Unintended Consequence

For Micah, on his birthday.

in labor,

i told the delivery room nurse the name we’d picked

and she said every michael she knew was a pain in the ass.

of course she had no business

but micah fit; michael with the end opened,

but what if we’d had another nurse?

anyway, we thought we were done having kids,

our family unit a complete sentence, a solid asteroid

that you knocked out of cool orbit

and turned into a comet, a nucleus of light,

defined by our shining tail.