Ultrasound
Black. So galaxy vast
and massive. It was, baby.
Less with room. Dark
*
On the morphine drip my fairy tale
mother quit eating/speaking Inklish.
She spoke only German droplets.
A trail left for me like kuchen crumbs.
Lost wife/witch wondering who will run her
big kitchen while she is floating in
paranoid gibberish. I divined her
dying tongue/stutter tapping out
slices of the fruit torte conception:
Believes she is here
because she is pregnant again/
on opiates so high
but the strangest post
partum is/was cancer much
younger than me/Gretel now.
*
Stirrup.
Touch.
Speculum.
Glove.
Finger.
Lube.
Magic.
Wand.
*
Hope floats me in the face
of their drowning sounds,
their clinical, vacuous sweep-
ing while the camera searches
my space bleariness. Light shines
open against my sex milky way
but stumps on a bump of lump.
Crater mound like a Quasar.
The assistant takes notes.
*
• Family History: Any
• close blood relatives
• who have. Reproductive:
• You never had children.
• Ethnicity: White women
• from Europe. Other:
*
Science comes before
the biblical. The astronomers
wear sterile, bright white
robes. Detect interference
in orbit. An asteroid off course,
heading this way. Comet tail
trailing after like a wedding train.
Jupiterian crush, this news
my planetary cold. This is no fallen
star. This is not. This knot.
*
Dark room with less baby.
Was it massive and vast?
Galaxy. So black.
Temporary
When I felt as though a piece of myself was missing
after giving birth,
That's because a piece of myself was missing
after giving birth.
If the transitory nature of my pregnancy took me
from what once seemed a stable frame of mind
to what next felt as manic as
an organ solo
on acid
after giving birth,
Perhaps that's because I felt a piece of myself-
a flat slab of hysterical cake-
form, set, bake
and then
flop out of its spring-form pan.
A birthday ache
that gifted my child life.
Afterbirth.
