Michelle Bonczek Evory The uterus is a fickle vessel

Vol. 12 No. 2

In the bay, oysters open and close, an eye, a mouth, lipped tight. Like a bivalve, an ovary does its thing, stringing out pearl after pearl, bubble after bubble, silent speech balloons evaporating

over our mouths like smoke from a train. Back to the sky you go, forever forward we chug. If I had a baby, maybe I’d name her Pearl, small girl emerging from the shell of me. But, as you must have sensed, I

don’t have a baby and it is such a loss this not having someone to name. As a teenager I’d compile lists of names in the back of notebooks, a girl column, a boy column. I’d swirl them in my mouth like fine wine

tasting every essence, every suggestion. Avery, Apple, Emerson, Plum, for a long time my grandmother’s name, Aleksandra, or, a combination of both my grandmothers, Annazandra, Zandy for short. Pearl…bubble…cloud…

This week, on a flight bound for Dallas, a heart meant to stay in Seattle was left behind on the plane. This is what we can do today: fly pieces of ourselves around the world. Implant parts of ourselves

into someone else’s body. Leave our hearts absentmindedly behind. Puff…Puff…Puff. Last year, a nineteen-year-old who tried to kill herself with a bullet to the head and survived, received

the first ever face transplant. We wait to see if her body rejects it. There is never a guarantee an embryo will implant itself in a womb, let alone one face take to another. Years ago, leaving

the mountainous Pacific Northwest for the flat Midwest was like leaving my heart on a plane meant to stay in Seattle. It was like trading one face for another. I’ve never stopped longing for those

rainforests, volcanos, moose knee high in a river, drinking the river, pissing the river. Longing to replace tornado warnings with tsunamis, to look out over the bay water and see oysters opening and closing, my ovaries stringing out

pearl, pearl, pearl.

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Uluhe Jim Thiele