A mocking bird made her nest
at the top of a telephone pole,
and I sat in the grass watching
a hawk eat her babies one by one.
She threw herself against him,
screaming with a broken beak,
his blood, her feathers
dotting the sidewalk.
I could see the babies in his throat,
one dark bulge. The last baby's head
stuck out of his mouth, suffocated
against the bodies of the others.
The hawk wobbled over the mess,
small branches the mocking bird had gathered
for her eggs. He digested his snack.
She was tired, crying against the hawk,
me, the street, the live wires
until her featherless belly broke open
with sadness and she fell
into the grass beside me.
There are children that you do not get,
but our hands cannot choose who we love
and who we should not love.
My sister took her stillborn baby
out of the freezer and sang to it,
her chair facing the window, and I watched
grief settle at the nape of her neck
the same way pleasure can, aching like a loom,
and I thought about how in the beginning
I used to sit with her and tell her stories
of Mary and Elizabeth, how they lugged
their bloated bellies for miles looking
for quiet spots where they could sit together
out of the wind and lift their dresses to look closely
at their stretching skin, the hands and heels
of their sons pushing outward, and how later
they pushed their full breasts to the mouths
of kings and saints, wincing at the bite,
the smell of black hair, the sound of feasting.
I remembered the night she lost her baby
I dreamt that I found her body at the bottom
of the drained pool in her backyard. I wept
when I finally found her round and heavy in bed.
I pressed my ear against her belly, still and emptied,
and I assured her that there were still stories to tell of Mary
and Elizabeth, how one way or another they would throw
the scraps of their children's bodies out to compost.
Because everything is capable of being broken,
how can we rest? Somehow we lift the heavy crates
of our unborn children everyday.
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