In Fertile Circles

It’s the wagon that the women ride, always on the left,
and it moves in a cycle that has no end, one turn of
the wheel bleeding into the next until the axle rusts.
Even then, we persist, desperate to fix the hum in
our home that has broken, hearing beside us the drone of
all those other lives that have ridden into the sunlight despite the odds.

We envy and rage, lost without our second selves,
but we know it’s a secondhand suffering, nothing like
those milk cartons festooned with missing
faces that squinted as the cardboard puckered, nothing
like the loss of a life we have already held in our arms.

And when it finally comes together, this seed and that
full moon, this tragic flood and that incandescent cell,
our hopes rise and soar until the blood returns, sixty days,
twelve weeks, even more than six months ’til she withered
on the vine, my heart dark and sick in my own, live chest.