1.
This must be what morning sickness feels like:
pushing a spinach omelet around my plate across the table
from a boy who maybe got me pregnant. I was a virgin yesterday.
It’s a long weekend in Ohio—
I’ve swallowed pills a friend of a friend’s doctor gave her for
emergencies. I trust her, because she’s someone who once
asked the universe to give her a guitar, and she has a guitar now.
2.
The pills work—I’m not pregnant. The boy takes a bus
back to his life without me and I go out to dinner with my father.
He has cancer. It’s newly June. Mussels are heaped on a plate.
New wet leaves on the trees are shivering like prom dresses.
How grownup I feel suddenly: somebody a baby could mistake
for a mother. Somebody whose father could die.
3.
But my father will live. Is this when I begin to catch the eye
of the gods? Is this when they mark me for not having paid?
4.
Thirty-four, working my way through a punch card for candlelight
yoga, falling through space. Darkness lapping
at my wrists and my ankles. That afternoon, my boyfriend,
a father already, had said– like he was reading tarot– he couldn’t
see us having a child. Like I’d drawn the card
for the hanged man.
The class was winding down. Soon, everyone would spray
their mats. But I was sprawled on a deck,
a fish someone had cut with a sharp blade down the middle.
On my left side, life waiting. My own baby. On my right—
how could I let love go now that I’d finally found it? The knife
sliced through. I chose both. Neither. How to explain
that I’m still there— late September, corpse pose? And the rest
of this— now— is the afterlife?
5.
In the afterlife, I can’t decide, so I go to a clinic
that promises a “snapshot of fertility.”
The lab says my ovaries are stones.
Stones with the imprint of ferns, yes.
But only the imprint.
They say last year I could have—
but my body skipped like a record.
The pretty doctor in leopard print shoes says
there’s no hurry anymore.
No follicles.
The ultrasound’s a cloudy night.
7.
Still, I’m trying to return.
The acupuncturist pierces my ear cartilage and my uterus leaps.
I have ovarian failure.
It is unexplained. I ask the expert about his anecdotes
of remission. Is it like a radio station
coming in and out? And he says, it’s more like the weather.
The acupuncturist says there is grief in my lungs.
I read the study about platelet-rich plasma.
I read the study about the self-healing provoked by bee stings.
And more good news
the women’s ovaries were removed and cut into strips, which were frozen.
Later the strips were thawed and cut into tiny cubes.
The cubes were transplanted.
But I don’t want my ovaries cut into cubes. Do you know what I mean?
That is not part of the birth stories the tipsy moms tell in the treehouse
under the stars over a kid’s zipline.
7.
I want to be a tipsy mom in the treehouse under the stars.
And if not –
8.
Decades to go? Regret like a car alarm that follows me
through neighborhoods?
No one to tell about the ancestors?
9.
There must be a place where I don’t have to remember feeling
the possibility of meteors.
How does one sneak out of the afterlife?
How can I stay in this body? How can I withstand the future’s
choose-your-own chapters in which I always fail
10.
to make something?
It’s what a mother would do— stay.
11.
The Dalai Lama says we’ve all been each other’s mothers
too many times to even count.
But I only remember this lifetime.
Sarah Green is the author of The Deletions (Akron Poetry Series, 2025) and Earth Science (421 Atlanta, 2016). She is also the editor of Welcome to the Neighborhood: An Anthology of American Coexistence (Ohio University Press, 2019). Her work has appeared in 32 Poems, FIELD, Gettysburg Review, The Paris Review, Pleiades, Copper Nickel, and elsewhere. She lives in Minnesota, where she is an Associate Professor of English at St. Cloud State University.
