Vanitha Sankaran's Pick:
Tower of Babies
by Frank O'Connor
"This poem reads like a fever dream, a relentless escalation of darkly whimsical images."
I once misheard a story about an attempt to reach heaven by means of a tower of babies. It happened a long time ago and it made God angry, so he destroyed the tower with his fist. Down it came, BAM! and the babies flew everywhere. Some of them landed in China, others in Peru. As they grew up, their babble turned into different languages. That's why it is so difficult for us to communicate today.
I found out later that it wasn't babies at all, but I still think of babies. I've even got my own tower. My husband welded the prams together and modified the suspension with a hammer. "That should hold her." he said. It actually holds three of them: him, her and him again, one on top of the other. Cute as buttons. It's much smaller of course, and I'm not God.
I live quite near the park so I like to walk them around the lake. People comment. They ask questions. If you look down, you can see six eyes staring upwards at the clouds, oblivious to the world underneath where chaos rules with bottles, springs, milk and cotton wool. It's all jumbled up but it's nicely suspended. My husband is very good with his hands.
"How do you manage it?" is a popular question. "You think this is bad," I answer, "there's loads more back home." People laugh, as if I made a joke, but it's true. We stack them up against a wall. My husband built the shelves. Every hour, I take three from their slot, put them in the pram, and bring them here for their spin. Then I go back for more. It's a little routine we have. Feeding the tower. Counting them out and counting them back again, like with planes in a war.
Having so many babies, it should be no surprise that some of them are not mine. Some we're paid to look after. Others, we just found. We try not to discriminate. Each gets the same amount of time in the sun, even my own flesh and blood. This is, after all, what Plato said was the basis of a firm and just society. They're all tagged and labeled so that no one ends up lost.
People tell me, "I bet you must be proud of them, all the same."
"I suppose I could be," I answer, "if I wasn't so exhausted all the time."
God knows we've tried other solutions. We even discussed adding another layer. That would mean I could stop walking before dark but then the center of gravity would be less certain so my going around the bend would take longer.
"Swings and roundabouts," says my husband, as he lines up another nail for insertion into a chair leg. "You can't have everything." I don't want everything, though. I just want to fit in, like a slab. Because, in the end, I think that people just balance on the top circle of the tower. Then it's babies all the way down, if you get my meaning.
Frank O'Connor is a compulsive addict in the army of frustrated writers. If he could just stop and become a moderately successful dog walker, then his life would be less erratic. But he cannot. The brain burbles. The fingers type. The dogs remain unwalked.