content warning for miscarriage and abortion

In the Museum

Embryos in vials
washed of blood, stripped
of surrounding skin
show how waiting looks:
white dot,
squiggle,
bean sprout,
fiddlehead,
they curl as all things do when they are new.
What we were once, they will be forever.

This section of the exhibit sits apart
from the black lungs, enlarged hearts,
brains that died hemorrhaging.
Living bodies examine preserved ones:
the dancer shows every tendon, the cobbler every bone.
A canal-like corridor winds into
the womb room, darker than the main hall,
with a sign that cautions:
some may find the sight of a mother dead,
her baby still inside disturbing.

I see where I came from, what I did at twenty.
The six-week fetus is the size of a fingernail.
It felt monstrous in my uterus
but now I can see it was only a beginning
with nowhere to go,
an acorn sprouted on a rock far from soil.

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