Member Poem

There are corn crop circles hiding behind

the backs of everyone in town, bent ovals,

“I don’t need all the details,” he says.
That’s what they always say when a woman

has to explain why she won’t bear a child,
tosses a cob in the middle of the symbolic

field. I thought I was ready, able to take
on the shuffled deck, Ten of Wands…

The stars make me feel guilty, blue with
burning hypotheticals like if your partner died,

and you married someone new, would you
possibly want a child then? Would I possibly

want to strangle the light out of my eye sockets
instead? Maybe I could run away to Puerto

Escondido and wear all azul…Possibilities,
they’re all manipulators. I want tarot cards to

tell me the message in the carefully-laid stalks,
I want the stalks to guide me into lax black

skies, and when I reach to tie a thread around
a white-hot star, there’s suffering for it, too.

Procedures, my blood drop. It’s so innocent, such
a pie-perfect dab against the sterile floor, how something

that once was, reaching deep into your stomach,
puts a clamp on your cervix. Goya knows

it is eternal: the pressure, the grasp from a heavy
hand that won’t let its grip go. It’s bottomless,

deep in the center of crop mazes, deep in women
where cold silver wrenches, like a hunched over

boulder beside every abortion clinic, no shelter...
Today, the angry mothers (who didn’t have the idea

first) and representatives of wooden crosses aren’t
throwing pebbles and condoms at the women

who walk through the doors. The snow is good
for that relief, it keeps all the bears buried below,

although if you crunch gently in the silent woods
after a few inches have fallen and listen

through the glittering wetness, you can tune in to the low
growling. But if you crouch into the tightest ball,

you can fall like the heavy clumps of flakes rolling off
black branches at the lightest breath, separate into moth mist.