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67 M-T, Turning Thirteen My son, M-T, comes home from school, attached to two black wires, dangling, his arms also dangling along those long legs. M-T dances his way through our house, through the street, through this world, and only the rhythmic rocking and banging as his head rocks and his lips move will tell you M-T is still alive. His ears connected to wires from a band around his head, into one pocket. Tubes hanging down my son, M-T’s body. It is a thing to see, I say, my boy no longer connected by an umbilical cord; instead, it is just these plastic veins carrying sounds. My son, now gathering reinforcement for those civil war teenage years. At school, they all walk the same, talk the same, laugh the same, it is no use now—we’ve only cloned ourselves. Now when he passes me in the house, I conclude, like my mother, like my Auntie, like my mother’s mother’s mother’s mother, we give up our children one by one; I say, like a woman, after all is said and done, giving up just when the baby is finally crowned, and coming, the baby, the hero. Labor pains will conquer us all just the same. We scream, “I can’t do it anymore—I can-not—push!” My son, M-T, has just been admitted into the world, where teenagers live. 68 The CD boom box booms; the stereo is his keeper. His room shakes the window panes; the walls bang the music out in steady vibrations through the day. At night, my neighbor shuts her windows tight, and I say, she has just girls, you see, just girls. So blessed, I say, so miserably blessed. ...

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