Have I not had my fill of you, dream babies?
You pull fluid from my body in a viscous river,
a red and wholesome, fulsome flood. I cramp and
I shiver; I deliver you (what I have of you) to the
tissue in my hand, to the filthiest waters beneath
dry land. And though this, your egg, is never seen again,
I catch you dreamwise, where you swell inside me
like sacs of butterflies or like that “…Lovely” song
by Mr. Wonder or, else, like the words I miss you,
or like cathedral bells. My never-made bed, my
glassy wish, my gazed-on stars, some light years away,
already vanished, I have come to let you go. I have
waited like a lover beneath the moon, my feet
in the snow, half–sad clown/half-loon and, being so,
I have come no closer to your conception. One exception:
I lied to my mother in the doorway in the dark, so I
could fool around with that boy in my room.
Weeks later, alone with a little white stick, my
heart icy-sick, palms slick, I was swearing to the air
I would bring you to an end. This morning on
YouTube a giraffe gave birth, pacing her pen
and hoofing the earth. I found myself breathless,
watching her move; she knew precisely what she
had to do, her belly swollen, her body whole—
mine, too. Now I wait for the doctor with my pants
sloughed off, weakly wondering at my mother’s line,
and I whisper to myself: It’s okay, it’s fine.
Here’s this: I have read HysterSisters.com and traced
each algorithm under my palm. He can take this womb:
this brittle, life-torn, Goddess-built flesh, this never-was,
might-have-been locus of rest. He can take what I
have pictured in the quiet meantime: your clenched
brown fists, your serious brow, your sour-milk skin,
your tiny will, if something dwells here to crush
and to kill—in me, who never made use of this thing,
who wears neither watch nor diamond ring.

—

Amanda Gunn is the recipient of the Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She received her MFA in poetry from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and is currently a PhD student in English at Harvard University. Her work appears in Redivider, Southern Humanities Review, Thrush, New South, Winter Tangerine Review, Unsplendid, and others.