Remember, in the days before gender
reveal parties, when expectant parents
would say they didn’t care if the baby
was a boy or a girl, as long as it was healthy.
Ten fingers and ten toes and all that
breeder bullshit. They didn’t mean it,
of course, in the same way that saying
being nominated for an award is as much
of an honor as winning. It’s not, and
anyone who says it is is a fucking liar.

One of the fires reducing the Pacific coast
to ash and rubble is rumored to have been
started at one such unnecessary affair,
pyrotechnics gone wrong in the name
of announcing the sex of a fetus. Fireworks
in a landscape as dry as Mike Pence’s
epididymis. You can’t cure stupid, but
you may be able to persuade it to sacrifice
itself to the flames, to burn alive, to smoke
dance, to paint the sky red.

In an ocean as warm as reheated soup, tropical
depressions and disturbances whip themselves
into feverish frenzies. They barely speak
to each other in their hurry to make landfall,
wash away any trace of survival. The wet
and wild gender reveal party has its names
picked out long before the due date arrives.
Meet Sally who wants to tickle the Panhandle.
Say hello to Paulette and Rene, neither
of whom can speak a word of French.

There’s Teddy, who has been researching
what it means to be non-binary. Vicky
with a “y” not an “i” or, heaven forbid,
two “e”s, is desperate to find her birth
mother and plans to look in (and devastate)
as many places as she can on the way.
The calendar says it’s only the middle
of September, but these uninvited guests
don’t pay attention to such details, show
up early, late, any damn time they please.