Deciduous
Once I am no longer a woman,
the narrative poem will finally turn into a lyric one
– Victoria Chang
For me, it was after I walked
through the security arch and
rode the elevator up to the ward,
where they pressed sensors
onto my heavy belly and needles
to the backs of my hand and body.
The sun plunged behind the iron
horizon of the window ledge, around
the world and back again, as I bled
onto sheet guards, toilet seats,
and gloved hands. His heart, inside
my body, beat a white track across
the monitor, which shrieked (its panic,
my own) each time the line sunk
under the red threshold. My doctor
went home. Another slid my chances
under the room door, and I agreed
to be scrubbed and shaved, dressed
in blue, rolled to the stainless steel
room where they opened my body
like a pinched lily bud. Out he came,
and as soon as my kidneys cleared
the drugs from my body, lignan
flowed in, flooded each cell in sap,
to become cambium, limbs rigid
but gone to gravity. A fallen trunk
is still useful: to shelter, to nurture,
to feed. But it isn’t a tree anymore.
*
Leah Hedrick is a midwestern writer, teacher, and mom. Her work has recently appeared in Silly Goose Press, Rattle, and Flash Fiction Magazine. She has a chapbook forthcoming in 2027 from Chestnut Review, as well as a micro-chap, Run Off, from Ghost City Press (2021).
This poem is so powerful.