thanks  for the thoughtful reads, Jamie and Tim. you both mention moving something down a line...but what? I went and looked once, will go back now. tom

Hey Tom, it's a little hard to explain, but it seems like the 2nd line 'was not' is creating the confusion for me between the two halves. 

Tom, you've set a challenge here.  Are the words intended to line in some way?  If not, the sheer jumble of them has immense power in conveying the disintegration that must follow the loss of a baby.

This is one I dearly wish I could hear you read....

k

Thank you very much, Tim. I will dig back in there and take a long look at that spot...your reading as two fairly separate halves very much suggested by layout, but may be the problem I have to fix. Tom

Thanks for looking at this, Kevin. There is no linear reading that I'm proposing, but small interacting clusters of words. I've gone to see if/how I could read it aloud, and it would involve backtracks and misrepetitions; it would be good for 2 or 3 simultaneous voices going down different paths. But the narrative bone, if all that were stripped off, would be something like this, I think:

my mind was not like your mind. you once said luck means good teeth but you were wrong. luck is what you used to fill in a hole with love when our baby died while you called in your debts from me.

--Tom