almost-mother

Written by Zoe Younessian
T.W.: Implied miscarriage

You write obsessively of motherhood & only 
the tragic kind. The kind people ignore or sweep
under a windowsill to mourn tomorrow.
Sunday mornings, you skim articles about women
whose sole tragedies are absence. Swallow
the rising pain — there’s been no loss, no death,
nothing except the life you’ve always known.
Blank pages, black coffee, birds fading out of view.
One robin built a home so close to yours that 
from your window you could count five eggs
speckled with sky, & every day you drank them in
as if they could fill the hollow in your belly, the notebooks  
devoid of love sonnets. They couldn’t; there was a storm.
What you remember now is how much you longed 
to watch the hatching, how easily you made a god of
your animal. You loved that robin like a dog would. You loved
like a dog well-versed in long waits, in strong winds. In 
flying back, worn, storm-dazed, to a home full of nothing.