Co-Parenting with My Best Friend
by Hiba Tahir
We settled on sea monkeys because we figured their bodies
would be easiest to dispose.
The founder, Harold von Braunhut, promised us “a BOWLFULL
OF HAPPINESS,” and our sophomore brains jumped
at the possibility. It seems illogical now, but I swear: hundreds
hatched, swam in their own filth, gulped air through a scattering
of feathered feet. Born with one eye, they grew
two more before maturity, and with these
three, they stared at us, endlessly. Endlessly. We shuddered
at the sight of them, but we were good mothers.
We fed and we watched them grow, and when they began
to die, I felt something resembling pain, something
like the stutter of trouble at the corner of West Fourth
and Montague, when we sobbed in Maira’s ’91
Mazda after she admitted she’d borrowed and broken
my pendant from Pakistan. I loved her like a sister, which is to say,
I forgave her. The last of the sea monkeys refused to die,
reared its hideous head, clung to life.
I told myself Maira would feed him if I didn’t.
She told herself the same.
We laughed, nervous, wondering where he found
sustenance. His siblings’ bodies disappeared one by one.
Hiba Tahir is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Arkansas, where she received the Carolyn Walton Cole Endowment Fund, the J. Chester and Freda S. Johnson Graduate Fellowship, and the James T. Whitehead Award. She is a 2020 recipient of an Artists 360 Grant from Mid-America Arts Alliance and a 2021 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council. She currently serves on the editorial board of Nimrod International Journal.