To R and the Southwestern Women’s Surgery Center
With seaweed inserted, cervix disclosed,
a changeling manifests. It is not
a secret anymore: the bits of placenta,
the not-yet formed wiggling
from skin inching into skin, unshielded.
I whisper to the breathless bloom
to welcome the curette. Another Brown
child dead on the news1. No preparation
for the violence of this world. How
am I supposed to protect what
emerges? My holiness
is made of holes: what is outside
‘drifts hollow, unreachable.
It falls through. Maybe holiness
does not always mean now.
That little glow baby of clay
and our resemblance grows
hair like curling jasmine vines,
the voice of a squeaking mouse,
the eyes of an elephant’s spirit migrating
from its transit toward the eternal.
I am transient, a whacked bug
still buzzing. Anxious attachment:
sticky side up, my feet wither into giving,
the want of a still place. You long
to be just right, decoded,
swatted if only to be swaddled. Substance
can be singular if you let it.
My leeching hands are not faultless.
Neither are yours, but fault
is wide, a cracked lacking. Nobody
was ready for the “it” to stumble
into being, adopt what they saw
as already damaged, what refused
to be nullified, what promised
a dysregulated mind. I cannot save
what I’m desperate to pluck. Lightning
flowers, maybe one day I could
pick my own: the sowed but unsought.
When I wake from the procedure,
I tell them: I am not scared anymore.
An elephant passed through me, vowed
to come back when we are ready.
What came out wasn’t a wound.
It was love set loose and maturing, a choice
with all futures open. I am
not the villain. In this version,
I get the boy, my body comes
back to me, and the doctor covid hugs
me and wishes me luck. I leave the clay
behind, sign my story in their little book.
When Roe falls, I will call them with gratitude
and ask how I can help. You, love, with mosquitos
drinking from your heart guide me,
drugged and guessing what form
really means. I don’t hide
the side effects of the procedure.
We are experienced pachyderms
now. We know how much we can carry,
that we is made of mes as Ali wrote.
Our unseen trunks intertwine in potential.
The clay child, unactual, plays
in a distant field. And we stomp on.
1 Adam Toledo: an unarmed 13-year-old Latino seventh grader in a special-education program, murdered by a white Chicago police officer, loved animals and reassuring his mother things will be better
