Stasis

The ultrasound picked up
the black hole of her embryo’s sac.
Her uterus, a death cradle,
holds an almost-child,
eight weeks in the making.
She had an idea it was a she.

This miscarriage feels nothing like her first,
where she asked a doctor to scrape
and vacuum her insides.
She did not want to see
the centimeter-long nubbin
fall out of her;
she felt like a tomb.

One week after her second embryo stopped growing,
she thinks of her uterus as a waterbed,
where a tiny organism sits, softly decomposing,
skin flaking away in the crest
of her uterine crib

She thinks of the almost-child–
webbed fingers
mismatched organs,
translucent skin–
and she wants to touch her.

She imagines a cute, dead embryo.
And then she wonders if that is possible:
a cute, dead embryo.