FM

this morning, at approximately 7:34am
a baby was born on the radio.
There it was, for everybody to hear,
we woke from our withering dreams
to the coos and caterwauls, drifting through
the speakers, the frequencies of every station-

parents woke to their rusted instinct,
meandering half awake to the abandoned
bedrooms of their now-grown children-
pregnant women woke in horror,
fearing they had missed their own delivery-
those of us who weren’t yet fathers
felt a temblor beneath our waists
that burped a numb acknowledgment
of what we could not know-

we heard it shriek, the baby on the radio-
like a wet kitten, or defective fire alarm,
but didn’t turn it off, we kept it there.

we dressed for our days and heard it crawling,
heard it claw and nibble at the microphone,
we determined it must be adorable,
and left our radios on to fill our homes with the sound.

Something was missing as we drove in silence,
a void we had not yet encountered, and so
we turned the dial to find it, fumbling through the static
to find that as quickly as we had come to need it
the baby on the radio was gone.