Abortion Wish
Wherever you are, whomever,
I would you were never
begun, Half-brother. Not for anything
you did, but for how she
was done when you began.
Autumn’s leaves clawing
the gravel drive he walked out on, that boy-
father after she told him
about it, about you. Nothing for her to do
but let her father pay the fare
to a charity in Portland
where she lived with other fucked girls
from other single-schooled towns.
There they studied for the life
a G.E.D. would bring,
learning to lower their eyes
as the lives inside them grew.
The night you were triggered I would void
so she never had to be that
alone: legs pressed wide
in a room full of gloves and masks
as she heaved you out
in sheet-twisting pain. With you
undone, no baby to not be touched
when a nurse held you to the glass
(she thought it a kindness)
while our mother—still in bed, still
bleeding at the rip, dried fig
of a smile on her beautiful girl face—
took in your ruddy cheeks, dark hair,
your shut eyes, the little features
she would come back to all her life,
what she went looking for
when nothing seemed to be looking for her.
Maybe a doctor or actor. How rich
or handsome by now? She never knew,
for you, like all the faces
when she went home, turned away.
Didn’t you know, Brother? You were the one
who carried her happiness.
Derek Sheffield would like to thank his mother who shared with him her joy in language by singing and saying rhymes and poems to him all his life, who nurtured in him a fierce kinship with the wilder beings of our world, be they furred, feathered, leafed, finned, or eight-legged, and who gave this poem her blessing. Catch up with him at dereksheffield.com.
Editor’s Note: This poem appears in Derek Sheffield’s book, Not for Luck. It is reprinted with permission of the poet.
Read more poetry by Derek Sheffield appearing in Terrain.org: “Report from America Auténtico,” a Letter to America poem translated into Spanish by Rhina P. Espaillat, two poems, and one poem.
Header photo by sippakorn yamkasikorn, courtesy Pixabay.
