Ode to My Miscarried One by Wendy Kagan

Ode to My Miscarried One

You, remote as a star—
all you knew was a kind of

floating.

Undulant, slight
as a comma

mote, iota, seedling.

You, magnolia blossom
silken, blush-colored cup
already fringed with brown
before yawning fully open.

You roomed in me just six weeks.
Those days, I called to you
hushed, staticky transmissions
returned to sender.

You, thought bubble
zealots’ unborn
sanctity without a face.

The world is exhausting—
no wonder you retreated
into a sloop of the uterus
that had shored up its moorings
to protect you.

Time was a dream you never woke to.

You simply stopped
growing
then spilled out in a red rush, curdled and thick
as mother’s milk gone bad.

You, soaker
though in that crimson river I saw
nothing of you.

Life sped on without you
who had best expressed its lavish excess:
bright cellular confetti.

Oh, nature’s spare
understudy

I fell in love a little
when your hazy half-light being
brushed against mine.

Why else would I find myself
after the terrible, echoey ultrasound
crying in chrome stirrups
riding your reachless
void, my womb
hollow as a death bell?

*

Wendy Kagan lives in New York’s Catskill mountain foothills. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as The Poetry Distillery, Eunoia Review, Chronogram, and The Baffler. Wendy holds an MA in English from Columbia University. Her chapbook Blood Moon Aria was long-listed for the Yellow Arrow Publishing 2024 chapbook competition.