I had a nightmare that I was pregnant
so I went out and bought a test to assess
despite a device in my body designed to prevent
me from having a baby. I think hard on this body,
what it would mean to carry (a girl, or a gun)
in a world safer for one than the other.
All girls should be born with a gun in place
of pink tongue. All girls should have
fingernail pickets, better to dig
their spade selves a safe place, even
the bunker, six feet under, tea with Persephone
under a hot weighted blanket, and cards.
Spread like legs, cards, love notes
from the future. Six of Swords. Three of Wands.
The Tower. The Hermit. The Tower, again.
Reshuffle. I sit on the toilet and dream
of the card I will draw. A cold throne.
Maybe the answer
is to be negation. Not-mother or
mother, the woman’s undone
as person. Become spirit.
Saint. Deified on her throne
in the waves, walking out,
hands astride, legs loping
chipped shells. Calling the sea as
my mother, I am growing another, and I wait
with my feet curled on white tiles
wishing for knives or mermaid legs
with no parting for babies to crawl in. Wishing,
to the foam of the tide,
remake me. I was dreamed from you, mother.
Take my hand. Take what lives
in me—night, the baby,
the lonely—serpentine, sentencing,
born from the mouth.
Disha Trivedi is from Northern California. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in The Shore, Occulum, Passages North, Luna Luna Magazine, and elsewhere. Her writing has been supported by fellowships from Brooklyn Poets. She is an editor and co-founder of M E N A C E, a magazine for the literary weird. She lives and trains in medicine in New York.
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