It's Time

Today is June 25th, 2022. I wrote this poem about a year ago. It's time to let it be read.

It Happened in Autumn

(c) Wampuscat Enterprises 2022

I knew the moment you were conceived,

The very moment when your father climaxed.

I had taken out my IUD a week or so before,

The small amount of birth control hormone in it having made me

Once again

Suicidally depressed,

Even though the GYN had assured me that wouldn’t happen this time.

I had uncharacteristically forgotten all about that,

In the heat of desire,

And it was the middle of my cycle month,

And then in that moment I remembered,

And I just knew

That we had conceived you.

This was confirmed a couple of weeks later

In the bathroom at the university where I was teaching.

(Kind of like how years later,

My girlfriend and I would skulk through a criminal courtroom

Full of shackled Black men in orange jumpsuits

To get married.

I have a habit of experiencing

What are supposed to be joyous life milestones

In the least romantic of places.)

I peed on the white plastic stick,

Purchased at a Duane Reade drugstore in Hell’s Kitchen,

And sat on the toilet in the dilapidated private faculty bathroom down the hall from my office,

Watching the stick as the word “pregnant”

Appeared in dull black letters.

I already knew, though.

I was 34 years old

With a PhD and a career.

I had been obsessively careful about contraception

All my life

To make sure this never happened.

A doctor had told your father years before

That his sperm wasn’t viable.

Your dad had been the top choice of donor for many of our lesbian friends,

So he masturbated into a cup

And the doctor looked at his semen under a microscope,

And reported that your father’s sperm had two heads and that

He “wasn’t a good choice of sperm donor.”

What a relief this was to me.

But your dad was disappointed.

Well it turns out your dad wasn’t shooting blanks,

In fact you have a half-sister now.

But that’s another story.

I knew what I would do about you,

I had always known.

I was brought up in the 70’s and 80’s going to political demonstrations,

Holding never again bloody coat hanger signs at age 10.

I was raised in a family of clinic defenders.

You quickly took over my body.

Suddenly my whole abdomen

Didn’t feel like mine,

I felt like I had an unripe avocado lodged somewhere mysteriously deep inside me.

Clearly my body was your home now.

You started eating all my food,

You made me so hungry all the time,

The hungriest I’ve ever been,

So hungry I gained 25 pounds in two months.

I felt swollen with liquid,

Swollen with you.

You also made me so tired,

The most bone tired I’ve ever been.

You took over my body,

Moved in right quick,

Made a home of me.

I called you “the parasite”

When I talked about you to my friends

And to your dad.

I called my acupuncturist on the telephone

And she said “congratulations!”

Before I could say “but I don’t want to be.”

That was awkward.

And I asked her what could she do?

There must be thousand-year-old herbal recipes I could take

To rid my body of you.

But she took a deep breath and said,

Well, there are things we can do

But you should call your doctor

It’s the best way.

Then it turned out,

It was too fucking early to get rid of you.

I had to wait another month.

It turned out you needed to be a little bigger

To get taken out of my body.

They sure as shit don’t mention that in the news, do they?

When they talk incessantly about

Which trimester,

How big,

How viable.

I hated that month of waiting.

I had never been so tired,

I had never been so hungry,

And the longer you stayed inside me,

The more colonized my body felt.

Not only that,

But your sweet father,

Your feminist father,

That prince of a man,

Turned out to be kind of an asshole right then.

He didn’t like it that you and I

Always needed to go to sleep so early.

He hated it that I was acting so dramatic all the time,

Even though everyone knows you were pumping hormones through my body,

Making me sad,

Making me angry.

So angry in fact that I left your father

For a woman later,

A person with a womb who menstruated

And understood this body of mine.

But that’s another story.

The day I got rid of you,

As I was coming out of the anesthetic,

I cried and told the doctor I was crying because of the Supreme Court,

And asked to see you in the plastic jar,

But you were just a tiny bunch of mucus.

Then I went out for pancakes

With all my lesbian friends who had come with us to the hospital.

I was still a weepy, angry, basket case for weeks,

As if you wouldn’t quite let go of my body,

From that jar that was probably in a landfill in New Jersey by now.

So, I broke up with one of my polyamorous girlfriends in a fit of inexplicable rage,

And I didn’t get my period for weeks and weeks

Until I went to a lovely Chinese man acupuncturist

While visiting a dear friend in Portland Oregon

Who stuck needles in me

And then 10 hours later

Finally, finally I bled.

I still think about you, I do.

You don’t have a name,

You didn’t ever have a face.

But I wonder:

What would you have looked like?

Would have been ugly and short and fat like me,

Or cute and tall and skinny like your dad,

Or somewhere in between?

You would have been really, really smart.

I know that for sure.

I will be certain in my heart forever

That I did you a favor.

This world is hard

And being alive kind of sucks.

And I didn’t want to be your mother,

I never wanted to be anyone’s mother.

My mother died when I was 15,

And her father died when she was 15,

And when you turned 15 I would have been terrified.

Also my mother died of a terrible autoimmune disease

That I’ve been petrified of getting sick with for my entire life.

I would have been so scared for you,

And about you,

It would have driven you crazy.

And I would worry the whole time that I was gonna fuck you up

Like everyone gets fucked up,

And I just would never live with that.

I would have felt trapped in my life with you,

And I have always wanted to be free.

So, thank you for leaving.

I do think about you.

When my friend sent me a poem recently,

A parent’s heartfelt ode to an unborn wanted child,

To my great shock

I cried,

But I didn’t tell him why I cried,

I didn’t want to explain.

That’s why I am writing this poem about you.

I would have loved you.

And I am really glad you’re gone.