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Edited on Sun Aug-12-07 02:03 PM by BlueIris
"IVF"
I come home early, feel the pale house close around me as the pressure of my blood knocks at my temples, feel it clench me in its cramping grasp, the fierceness of its quiet sanctioning the small and listless hope that I might find it mercifully empty.
Dazed, I turn the taps to fill the empty tub, and draw the bathroom door to close behind me. I lie unmoving, feel all hope leaching from between my legs as blood tinges the water, staining it the quiet shade of a winter evening drifting in
on sunset. Again, no shoot of life sprouts in this crumbling womb that wrings itself to empty out the painfully-planted seeds. The quiet doctors, tomorrow, will check their notes and close the file, wait for the hormones in my blood to augur further chances, more false hope.
My husband holds to patience, I to hope, and yet our clockworks are unwinding. In the stillness of the house, we hear our blood pumped by our hearts that gall themselves, grow empty: once, this silence, shared, could draw us close that now forebodes us with a desperate quiet.
I hear him at the door, but I lay quiet, as if, by saying nothing, I may hope that somehow his unknowingness may close a door on all the darkness we've let in: the nursery that’s seven years too empty; the old, unyielding stains of mestrual blood.
Perhaps I wish the petitioning of my blood for motherhood might falter and fall quiet, perhaps I wish that we might choose to empty our lives of disappointment, and of hope, but wishes founder—we go on living in the shadow of the cliffs now looming close:
the blood that's thick with traitorous clots of hope; the quiet knack we've lost, of giving in; the empty room whose door we cannot close.
—Kona MacPhee
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