Hollowed Spaces

 

“Because if you weren’t an Aunt or a Martha, said Aunt Vidala, what earthly use were you if you didn’t have a baby?” – Margaret Atwood in The Testaments: The Sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale)

 

The word womb.

The speakers of Old English used the word for belly, bowels, heart, uterus.

Isn’t it amazing that it uses all forms of the word carry?

It holds like a bowl 

like the barrel of a gun

like Hermes.

 

My last ultrasound was quiet, hollow, void

as it should have been.

The only thing that I would have born 

would have been parasitic and violent,

 

But the quiet still gutted me.

There is something solemn about an empty womb.

To see it hallowed like a sanctuary, or

hollowed out like a cave

An echoing image of what could be –for better or worse–

another life. 

 

Sobriety occurs when I have a sneaking suspicion

That the gods aborted all of my babies for me. 

Do I say thank you or scream until there’s a cave-in?