The Poem I Can’t Write
Because while we’re trying to get pregnant,
we do not, and so the painting in the museum
did not prophesy conception. In it, two
whale sharks swim, mouths open in a mantle
of squid, catching as many as they can,
and the water meets the night sky, full moon
illuminating the earth straight through
to the ocean floor. When we passed it,
I felt such certainty. Months before,
you’d looked at me in a sweaty bar downtown
and reminded me we’d be lousy parents,
I was out of work and renting rooms
from whatever friend would let me, and you
didn’t own any furniture, you slept on an air
mattress and kept your most important books
and notes in piles in the corners of your studio.
But it doesn’t work when I try this way
to convince myself that it’s for the best,
I still feel the empty crescent where inside me
should be full, I read the world for its clues,
the painting calling to me like a tarot card,
like the Empress. I planned to remember
the painting, and write in all the vivid colors
in my head about how those submerged
wide-mouths predicted a baby that day,
and while I waited I too was under water,
without breath, learning to let go of gravity,
of stories I won’t tell.
From Easy Victims to the Charitable Deceptions of Nostalgia (White Pine Press, 2024) by Emily Schulten. Copyright © 2024 by Emily Schulten. Reprinted with the permission of the publisher.