Disney Vacation
Carol Everett Adams

1. Planning for the Trip

Birth pains squeeze me
so you offer to cut the thing out.
You have your Christmas smile on
because you’ve wanted to cut a baby
out of a woman your whole life
and you’re thinking At last! At last!

But this is my baby I gasp
in the grip of a giant white cartoon glove,
and you say with your knife That’s not the point.

2. It Will Cost Too Much

You declare you’ll take the newborn to Disneyland
and I say Like hell you will.
But you remind me this was the plan
all along; grow a baby and feed it to Disneyland,
and it’s what I’ve always wanted.

3. That One Circle Place When You Walk In No One Remembers What It’s Called

As you shove me through the turnstile
I ask when you’ll decide if it’s a boy or girl,
and then your anger stands up black, blots out the sky
like that demon in Fantasia. Centaurs and mermaids
scatter, baby fauns drop their panpipes,
and you sing like opera meets Satan: It! Doesn’t! Matter!

4. Main Street USA

We imagine a salt breeze from Harbor Boulevard;
Walt said we could do it. We search the map
for his frozen remains, and push the stroller,
smiling like people in a magazine.

5. What’s the Name of That Other Goddamn Circle?

The baby gums plastic Fisher-Price shapes.
Why are there so many circles here? you whine.
Stop whining in front of the baby, I whine, and anyway
that last circle back there was called The Square.
You shake your head, disgusted. We both know
we circumnavigated a fucking triangle in a more or less
zigzag motion. I hate geometry. This won’t end well.

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