» Poetry

Gravida 3 para 1

When the nurse asks if I have a surgical history

I begin to form the word of my uterus and its

drawing out, consider inviting her into the recovery room

filled with women giddy from their return to somatic

solitude, then into the smoke-filled apartment with its

futon mattress and warm bottle of retsina, reward

just for time, passing from before to after

it. I begin to form the word, but the word—its roundness, its flat vacuum

of a face—swallows its own tail. After the medical abortion

I imagined a fish, small fry flapping, and still in some Boston Harbor

it haunts a stand of seagrass, is haunted in turn by its half-sibling

the surgically aborted, ripped from stories

too. Sibling’s sibling I do not speak of, my double-standard shame, my

ill-gotten fishlet, in my mind I hold you in loving kindness and say no