the gynecologist presses her palm against my belly, searching for a sign

of tumor forty-two days in bleeding. This morning a clot filled my hand

the size of a baby mouse, smell like cold metal

or stream. When vaginismus drags a scream from me

she puts ice water rags across my throat and tells me to breathe

fill each lung slow, let the pelvis relax, the hips fall

so far open I could be a sky, a red cloud full of the sound

of rain and teeth. So much blood she can’t

see to the back of my uterus, her hands

searching inside the childless and breathless blessing

of arch, swallowed song. O friend, o darling,

o sister-sweet with violets woven in your jaws, be with me

here: red after red spilling between my thighs like the wing

I found rocking before my door one day, tether

twisted around knob wrenched from socket. The empty body

gone in the early spring rain, wind tugging the blue-gray feathers

where I met my reflection in glass. Blood rapture of one ovary

then another pressed in her hand, cradle-bruised quicksilver burial ground.

And here, again, instead of a god of cord and covenant, I turn to you

like you could sew your hands across every hole in this dangerous sky.

Not baby but elegy pearled from nitrate and albumen

in the gentle of your fingers. If I lick this red from my hands

will I be born again with the right hungers this time,

flooding until she spills a trackless night back between star

and ache? If the rib cage in the prairie

dotted by yellow flowers

like a crib not far from here, if a highway where every faith

is red across the asphalt, what then do I call down through me

into the circle we make of our hands, a pelvic bone

ringing the flood, the iron, the wreck we choose in each other again and again?