» Poetry

Notes from Four-Tenths of a Daughter

The men next to me at work won’t stop
rattling on about the one-child policy, how desperately
China needed it, how necessary it was for economic sociologic
environmental psychological progress, humanity requires
logical advancement, this was the most effective protocol.
They carry on as if I weren’t close enough to see the spit
contracting from their mouths, two only children,
childless sons whose mothers cried,
relieved when the ultrasound projected undeveloped
shadows pointing the right way, relieved at securing
their value, which is an uncoded way to say,
their safety. The birth rate dropped 3x in just 20
years, did you hear, it’s only 1.4 kids per person now, as if anyone
could give birth, as if the 1.4 did not mean
a full son & four-tenths of a daughter, as if second
children were not occasionally allowed if the first
was female, or severely disabled, or dead, as if
my mother did not confess to me, crying
that her firstborn would have been
a son had he not swum away, as if I did not feel
like my life were a clearance aisle consolation prize,
as if. Behind me, my boss slams shut
her laptop, retorts while leaving, You don’t know
the suffering people went through. The men don’t
slip a beat. I shrink smaller
behind my monitor, remember
Féng Jiànméi, how at 23, she chose to give
another life, how at 7 months, she was forced
into a van, blindfolded, to sign away nothing
she didn't already know, that when her child arrived
still, she knew it was from the two long needles
they sharpened through her abdomen. I’m at that stage
of perceived womanhood where once a month,
someone asks me my intentions for the future: will you
ever want a child? I gently remind them of our ongoing
ecological catastrophe, & who could forget, our astronomical
inflation. Me? A mom? … In this economy?
But really, I never want to suffer
another life with my genes. I’m terrified of the possibility
of the egg coalescing into a daughter, of having
to teach her why her body will feel like a beautiful
layered cake, one the rest of the world
will gaze & feast upon, one that she might
never learn to taste.