My poem “Box Without Hinges” will be published in the upcoming issue from New York-based The MOM Egg, Volume 9, coming out in May of 2011. I’m especially excited about this publication, which features poetry by or about mothers. This poem, originally titled Couvade, was part of Louder Walls as a poem about sympathetic pregnancy, a condition in which the partner of an expectant mother experiences the sensation of pregnancy.
Box Without Hinges
woman with a white chest big
as a barrel and slick as an oyster
with sweat in the morning by the toilet
I hold my ballooned belly in thick wristed
hands as it swings and sticks and swims
I eat mostly pitted
fruits, crave an inconvenience
as it is winter and apricots are
dry as old women’s wombs
I push knobbled fingers against
my temples the tremble thrills
against me and my teeth snap
so hard they float
before day breaks I have not slept once
the falling and hatching
it is at once the only cure
my eyes on different shards of
my belly shell, I see at two angles
the last of me, my
sweet yolk glossed,
sun sopped and gently cooking
sun sopped and gently cooking
