After the Second Miscarriage by Marybeth Rua-Larsen

Your embers, still with the blush of blue flame, are in no hurry to ash, and like Batman, who secretly hoped to learn the samba and kept waiting for his chance, you rehearse the mechanics of becoming. Nothing and no one wants to go back to tabula rasa or rhyme runes when they could keep testing with a basal thermometer. Errata be damned. Break the hymen a third, fourth, and fifth time. It’s easily soothed with myrrh and a mantra. Maternal instincts and the rebel yell of heresy feed your arsenal, and entering the unfinished nursery, you borrow the mulberry manual, the one the lyre narrates, and study tips on raising that runty shrub into a tree, for the berries as much as the silkworm. It’s the nth time you’ve tried, and you’re exhausted; what should be natural requires a seer these days. The embers rumble as you count on damp lumber to burn.

Marybeth Rua-Larsen’s poems have appeared in Cleaver, Measure and American Arts Quarterly, among others.  She won a 2017 Luso-American Fellowship for the DISQUIET International Literary Program in Lisbon, Portugal, and her chapbook Nothing In-Between is available from Barefoot Muse Press.