8 Weeks: Raspberry

When his heart stopped, my dad was gathering
raspberries in our backyard where canes lace the fence.

He doesn’t eat them anymore. They taste like broken
ribs, an incision’s burn, the first long shadows

at the end of day.Already your heart has beat
more than three million times. At the ultrasound

you’re a tailed, ethereal tadpole like the ones I’d bucket up
and turn to frogs as a kid. So long ago now.

Your yolk sac a trailing balloon. You riot
on the screen, light crashing, your heart strobing

your whole body on and off, flashing as fast as you can
say bright bright bright bright. The closest I’ve come

to death was near the Devil’s Kettle during a thunderstorm.
I cowered alone, cold then colder in the woods until

my pulse went breakneck like the hooves
of a bolting doe pounding back to the road.

This is what’s coming for you: the throb and rush
muscling you out from what you know.

Once a sparrow mistook my open window for sky,
swooped trapped loops around my room until exhausted.

When she finally gave up, I made dusk with a blanket
and held her to my chest—her heart as fast as yours is now—

then let her go. Are you afraid of passage? Or are you caught
up in the present, the slow thump of my heart

limping along above you? You may think
that song is endless. I’m afraid not.

17 Weeks: Pomegranate

A ritual of mine on my birthday: I listen
to my mother tell me of my eager birth,

how she had to squeeze her knees together
to keep me in; then I eat a pomegranate, round

and red like the clasp of her blood around me
the day I was born. Painstaking,

picking out seeds after breaking the hull,
as if untangling an endless rosary.

And yet each bite’s tart burst worth
the separating.This week I feel you move.

You feel like my pulse, but loose, unbound,
and from the wrong place. You feel like

fingers tracing a name in the sand,
a beached fish hoping for waves,

bird wings resisting a window. You’ve been
animate for weeks, but now I can feel you

are not me. In the north woods, we sleep
in a tent and wake to wind wilding the pines.

My waking and the unbranched blue jays wake you.
I can feel you turn toward morning.

Someday I won’t. You’ll unentomb from me.
For a year, you’ll bloom by my milk, but someday

you’ll eat straight from the sun’s sowing.
I’ll carry you, but then you’ll walk

away. Already I can feel you springing. A leap
of faith, all of this, to believe I can grow you

and let you go, hold on and let you go—someday
whole seasons fallowed by your absence.

20 Weeks: Sweet Potato

Not a nightshade, but a morning glory,
the sweet potato buried underground.

The tuber roots in the dark, like you, somehow
now aware of sky. Your fists stretch upward

and you sense days fading in and out, suddenly
circadian. Does dawn throw some bloodrose glow

over you? I am half a moon and waxing.
You lunge inside me and practice breathing

by gulping water. Your larynx rises
memorizing a mnemonic for the hereafter.

I wonder what you know now that you’ll forget.
The closest I’ve come to remembering

the womb was on a moonless midnight,
nineteen and floating alone in a lake.

Limbs dissolved. Waves hushed the shore.
All I could see were the stars threading

together the faraway. I felt I belonged again
to the between. Night is potent, memorial

to our earliest threshold. I’m afraid we all go
day-blind out here. Sweet root, store up

what you need to keep what comes before
you sleep like we do and wake when day breaks

the dark beyond, the trillion visible stars
overshadowed by just one rising sun.