☀ Today's Poem: "How My Children Were Made" Stacie Cassarino

Not with lust,
though the unsettled lover that carries my child
through woods of tapped maple trees
laid the sum of her muscular body on top of mine last night
and I wondered what could be made of that feeling,
already one hand on my belly holding the two of them warm,
deep in snow and the slow drip of sap into each pail.

We're walking with the biologist from Toulouse
whose burly husband fires up the sugar shack while their two sons
trail behind, and I stay at her side, wanting the closeness
of another mother. It's too early to know which heart
is viable, or how I will explain the singular life
I've chosen, with each step cautious not to fall on the ice-
rooted path, I hold onto anything within reach—the blunt light
of sky, her arm, the lover, my child, trunk of the hardwood—I want
to open my mouth and taste what there is.

No view of the mountains,
only a matter of time. But this is where
we would admire things like eminence, panorama,
perspective, or note the way our bodies are made
expansive by the intimacy of strangers who see us. What other way
do we know we are home? The science
of existence directs us to a language of outcomes. If this,
then this. I've read about the generosity
of trees, especially the mothers, ancient and wise, that nurture
and grieve and perceive each body
that passes through. Silhouette, shadow. And here we are taking
what we can for our own sweet pleasure.

At the clinic, the doctor named the risk factors,
and when it was over, praised his collection
of eggs. I was still nothing
more than a repository of longing, I was no one's passion, held
down by other forces. And months later, I watched the film
of my uterus on the screen—all I had to do
was lie there while two embryos were released
into the dark of me
until the lights went out, and I was infinitely alone,
only the nurse's hand to hold.

What part of this
is luck? What part of luck
contains happiness? What part
of happiness is the fact of our interdependence?
Of desire is science. Of taste is feeling. Of instinct
is love. Of child is poetry.
There's no need to apologize for the clouds.
Do you want to discuss reduction? the doctor asked me.
And to think of the frailty of trees
when other trees are removed. The sentience
of the forest, alive yet mute.
That I could choose to eliminate one
and keep the other. That something was taking form
at the boiling point, and all I could do
was open my mouth to the pure amber light echoing
from the place where the mountains
should have been, sticky and solicitous and eager.