The grass is dry, the Earth is round

I started to think of my belly as a baby bump. An expanding ball, a dump of fatty jiggle beneath my drooping boobs. I’d stand in the dimly lit room, sideways in the mirror, hands over its heart and growing brain.

It was the closest I would ever get, my fallopian tubes severed and sealed in a hazardous medical waste bag. My vaginal walls drying like rose petals in the sun’s thinning light. I would never call it a drinking problem because that is not what the problem was.

The problem was the hole. I couldn’t hold my husband’s body inside of mine forever. I couldn’t feed another’s inner worm tube with secretions from my own. The emptiness went on and on like two mirrors facing off.

Egg and sperm would meet but wouldn’t dig in. Meanwhile all these fluids running through, running through, fluids from holes leaking hot between my legs. Fluids up the straw, down the throat, Through the belly like an umbilical cord on fire.

Michelle Bonczek Evory’s poetry collection The Ghosts of Lost Animals won the Barry Spacks Award (Gunpowder Press) and a 2021 Independent Publisher Book Award. Her open-source book Naming the Unnameable: An Approach to Poetry for New Generations (Open SUNY Textbooks) is taught in creative writing courses internationally. She currently lives in Oregon and is a creative writing instructor and mentor at The Poet’s Billow (www.thepoetsbillow.org). She can be found there and at www.michellebonczekevory.com.

Connie Wieneke