More on: pregnancy

I want to go back to Manderley and drag myself up the stairs at midnight. See myself. Pull my baby up through the water from the land of the dead.

YOU WERE HOLDING THE BEEF DIP you had brought to the vegetarian potluck when I met you. The potluck was the lunch hour of the day-long birthing class at our midwife’s cabin. Through the large window behind the kitchen sink I saw the snow falling heavy and wet on the woods behind her home. I…

I’ve always loved that scene in The Seventh Seal where Jof, poor broke Jof the juggler, rushes back to tell his wife Mia that he’s just seen the virgin & child, so close to me that I could have touched her, but Mia is skeptical, wants to know what they’ll eat this winter, wants to…

______I am soft sift ______In an hourglass _____________ —Hopkins Against the darkening winterplum sky, a lone contrail whitens—loose thread, untufted cotton. A perfect inverse of me: ____________________________Lenten moon of my belly taut, halved by a slurred gray line. Linea nigra, the doctor says, my belly button’s new ashen tail a ghostly likeness of the cut…

Last week a jellied disc in one of my husband’s lower vertebrae cinched, slipped—on the x-ray the bones’ thorned edges gritted against each other, his whole spine yearning left, a lily stem arched toward the promise of light. Now the days shrink into themselves, the trees bare-limbed but for squirrels’ nests and the green bloom…