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M. E. Hope

To ease my thoughts, mother talks about a miscarriage

-- For C.M.

Painting rooms, sanding the notches of those gone
covering the notes scratched inside closets
a single place for privacy near the bare wires:

a retreat as muted as her wounds.

She hid inside sorrow and I would have been kinder
had I known how time stopped;
a sister who hadn’t wanted to play.
Her womb curled about the void.
Perhaps I would have understood my own betrayal;
perhaps I would have been kinder.

I am barren in a biblical way.
Cancer achieving what no chemical could.
Weighed as an only value I would despair:
a wife to throw out.
One who will not bear down or labor
to bring forth more than a comma shaped pause
of clot and a cells deceit.

I hold her single breath,
this dark retreat near her heart:
paint over the marks of those gone
as if they’d never arrived.

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