when she falls you fall
fallout
fifteen minutes doctor procedure peering into my vagina-cum incubator
now turned off by skull-crushing heat of Fentanyl
crept slick-like into vein
needle removal of thumbnail DNA
moving from much, infinite potential beautiful rays laughter
and fingers curled around mine and hair growing longer, growing blond curly growing and she
and I against the worlds of strictures and men
to nothing. To flat stomach, unmarked,
Infinity halted absolutely…Two and a half weeks afterward
marked by bleeding and occasional pain in ovaries
but a still heart silence,
no beating for children, no raw flapping
near tears at mere sight of their small form which dogged me
far before the test.

Still night of the heart for a child.
her bed operated on and packed away
focus turned intensely inward to healing of this space, toward survival
part of me now endangered, entered by science and woman must protect herself from
these foreign substances and tools

Now he and I future parents regardless. Seemingly
eliminated
all chance
of love breaking, of forgetting the ocean
and our bodies dipped within it and out again into sun wind streaming delight
off our naked forms
all chance of having to return to death and its unknown bed
its headline and perpetrator
eliminate all chance of ever feeling cold again of suffocating within
wraps of a new struggle
of seeing some mother hating her child at the subway stop
while I stand, feeling finishing pangs of ovaries healing.

The charge I lay at the world’s feet in wake of this loss:
To maximize the particular slant of your bluest eyes, their chameleon nature
to mimic the sea
maximize your deepest pools of inner purity, most beauty in one person
ever stumbled upon in this lifetime and all I wonder is
how to best cherish and nurture you,
make you glow through your own sludge–trying and not making music–
how to bring our child into being at the right time but instead
of steadiness, comfort, soft undulate tide to wash over you, I cut like a light through
dilated pupil half-lidded in the humid shade,
a blade of any tropical grass green but sharpest in its beauty,

you and I lulled into loving and forgetting survival, forgetting our endangered
status of us against beauty fought at all her borders,
Fentanyl easily eliminating life, not even knowing our body parts which need
protection–the heart, the mind, the hope
and not even knowing how little we know about our brothers and sisters, those who were not aborted, those numberless other beauties…

And here at the half lidded pupil closing against the beautiful border of survival, of meeting, we recognize the disappeared, landless, the sold, those who are still fighting though we are not. We are not. Poor enough, here, but rich in comparison to our sisters and brothers, we are not fighting, but loving, feeling at the fragile edges where our love is being battled by the world, where the world wants to tear it apart, with simple scientific precision, instrumental planning,

But we love here, lulled, oceanic, simple-minded, potential parents, unwitting partners in bare revolution.

This is the second poem in a four-day series The Opiate is publishing by Nova Reeves. Read Day 1 here.