Behold my womb, quick with life! Yes, world, the rumors are true–I’m pregnant. What the hell, full disclosure: Iraq is the father.

What, Iraq is just a series of frontiers, a geopolitical abstraction? Try telling that to my uterus. I went to Iraq a few weeks ago and already I’m rounding the corner of my first trimester. It was that good.

It all started when Iraq sent me a museum-opening-advertisement-cum-postcard (an ‘Iraqi text’) that had two words on it: “Let me.” My interest was piqued but not duly so. Over the next few days I received more—now more to the point, and in rhyme:

When you come to Iraq…you get shellacked.
When we hump by the Euphrates, shit be hotter n’ Hades.
What happens in Iraq—scars you for life (scars in a good way).

What can I say–I was intrigued even though that last one didn’t rhyme. Brad was cool with me going, too, because he knows that I can’t be confined to organism-on-organism sex.

Oh, and the child will be the human manifestation of the two-state solution—which kind of makes me Mary.