One month from today could be
your birthday.
In one month we could meet each other
for the first time.
Maybe in one month
I will be on all fours like an animal
and I’ll scream you into the world
and you’ll stop being just a dream.
You are a product of me,
within me.
You are mine
You are not mine
You will always be mine.
Through ripened flesh
and viscera you will unfold,
purple and milky,
bursting through a darkness,
limbs released into your father’s arms,
squeezed and wrinkled,
bright with pain,
having to relearn what it means
to be alive.

I have heard it said that women glow
But I never knew it to be so
Until I met you
Then I knew it was true
With your belly round
The glow profound
And with a kick or two
Our little flower grew
These months I'm counting down
Your glow bright as a Queen's crown
And it humbles me
This beauty I see
Let joy and love abound

To my little one who pushes me from the inside out:
because of you
my eyes see new colors.  
Funny how
there are perhaps as many nuances of love
as there are shades of green in a summer forest
and there is only the word “love.”
Sadness too.  
Like the sadness of giving up
something you didn’t know you wanted.  
That was you.
Was you.
You occupy me.  
Within and without.  
My feet and my heart ache.
I watch how people's’ eyes are drawn to my stomach.  
Celebrating roundness
where there was once flatness
and that was once celebrated
is also a funny thing.  
I do want to laugh and it is easy to.  
Crying is also easy.  
Sometimes they are indistinguishable  
or
one becomes the other.  
Becoming.  
If that is what I am doing
how is it different
from what I have been doing my whole life?

I feel jailed in my own body
socially forced to conceive
emotionally sick
hurt within

Scared to transmit pain
in this age of depression
reminding my ancestors' culpability;
will I also hurt my descendant?

Struggling to finish a phd
in this age of precarity
thinking it might push me;
Or, will I fail it all?

My baby moves in jumps and flutters inside me,
like the barn swallows that make nests
of dirt and twigs outside the restaurant.
Yesterday they disappeared
and I learned that a maintenance man came and hosed them down.  
Tragic, he said.
But necessary.  
Too much bird ****.  
When I got pregnant
it felt like waking up at the top of a roller coaster.
And then an engagement.  
Somehow
this is how my life is going
and somehow it does not feel like cliche.
Ask as many what-ifs as you want
but there is just a single trajectory.
Even though you have to fall asleep one day
before waking in the next.
Moving through concentric circles and trying to find the center.
Biology is happening
in a part of me that I am still getting to know.  
Kaleidoscoping.
She was once the size of a grape
but now I read she can blink her eyelids.
She is also not like the barn swallows.