To the doctor who told me,

“You should just be grateful you’re alive,”

when I tried to ask a question at my 2-week postpartum checkup—

 

do you know how many “shoulds” I have quietly swallowed

in this life? So many that your should got stuck

in my throat, willed me to suck

in my breath and hold it—

 

I have spent the last twenty years trying to shrink myself.

Not even in childbirth could I make myself bigger,

but forced open by drugs, catheter and balloon,

examining fingers, knife, retractors.

 

If only, in my gratitude, I could melt

into your pleather examination chair,

become a sheer whisper of clean white paper,

that could be so easily discarded.

 

When you said to me, “Go home and enjoy your healthy baby,” and I said,

“She has RSV”:

There was our white silence,

like wound packing.

 

“Well,” you said, and I knew you wanted to smudge, to knead

the thirty-six hours my uterus was slowly splitting open from the inside,

the hours when you slept and I bled

and your residents and nurses sang their own uncertain song—I don’t know I don’t know

I’m so sorry, I don’t know

      (At least they were sorry)

And after, the minutes

empty of air;

no baby to hold for 12 hours

 

6 years later and I am shrunken

but not dissolved. You didn’t melt me.

I still belong to this world,

where nothing can be erased,

only turned

into something else.