Imagining a pregnancy

An old watercolor/sketch by my oldest daughter.

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This is a poem from my senior year of college, and it ended up being one of the poems that got me into graduate school. I’ve been curious to revisit it for a while. At the same time, I recognize that twenty-one-year-old me wasn’t really fit (?) to do all this wondering/longing/judging about pregnancy/marriage/etc.

I’ve been fiddling with the language of the poem, but I have left the questionable tone (mistakes and missteps and all) of the poem intact. It’s more of a time capsule than some poems, I guess.

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1.

The proposal:
to carry this baby like a bird in my hair
so that when the wind lifts her off,
I won’t know, I won’t hear.

2.

It’s been a month.

I think about pregnancy, I read the genetics book
for a class I am actively failing. 
When does morning sickness start?

3.

At night, can’t sleep, my body is shaking inner.
I lay my hand against my womb, feel the pulse
beating out of my thumb.

Baby, don’t come.
Your mother is a virgin, though a rumpled one at that.
Your father is leaving the country next year.
He doesn’t want you, he doesn’t want me.

4.

Last weekend I went home and ate chicken with my family.
The milk tasted gluey.

Later I talked to my older sister on the phone; I laughed precursor 
and said You know this is a very weird question but anyway
how soon does morning sickness start? And she said O, about a week
and I felt sick with disappointment and repeated A week?
and she said Well I started throwing up and got so thin she said
I could see him moving when I was three months along
I could see him swirling around like a fish—

After we hung up I held my belly,
beige sour milk at the back of my throat. 

5.

To want a baby at twenty-one: I decide it’s just fear of the future, fear
of being alone. JUST FEAR I write carefully in my journal,
writing each word carefully.

6. 

I scratch a flea from my sheets
but it’s only a crumb.

7. 

We went to a party tonight for a friend and her husband
who had gotten married quickly, without time for a reception.

They danced their first dance, smashed lemon cake, opened gifts
amidst proud married friends and two beige frowning babies.

One clamps my finger. His mouth is gooey pink 
and filled with a small poking tongue. 
The third eye, I think poetically. What takes it all in.

8.

From the kitchen, I hear my little sister grumble
I think I have cancer. Vitamins rattle from a bottle.
Meanwhile I am shouting with life, with the desire for life.

9. 

I can already read the psychologist’s point of view; I can see him
squinting his hairy eyes: Hmmm he says Hmmm—obviously
this young girl is failing to find her identity in schoolwork
or loose verse; she imagines herself to be pregnant; 
her Christian values have convinced her 
that procreation is the only legitimate form of creation.

Two months ago I didn’t want a boyfriend.
Now I want a baby.

10. 

Any day now I know it will come: 
I know the red film of womanhood
will glance through my days like iron gossamer,
knocking down everything in its path.
Then the plan will be over: the imagined 
nausea and purposeful fretting. 

I will be as singular as the day I was born—
not friendless, not useless.
Just alone.

11. 

The air tonight smells clean like leaves.
People bicycle unsmiling with banded hair.

12. 

It’s been a month.

If I think about my baby, I will cry
because she never really had a chance in my womb.
She furled and dried flat before she could bloom.

Like the delicate, desiccated, flaking bodies
of yellow widowed bees on the window sill—

like the rattles of a rattlesnake in an empty tin can—
like the leaves that crunch hard, the color of rust—

she twitched to dust from nothing much: 
dun-colored, pencil-limbed, never-lived.

I lift my hands, the baby speaks some language
that sounds like nothing, like a glass full of wind.