A Poem for World Infertility Awareness Month

Infertility is a struggle many face in silence, without the support of their community. Kelly Grace Thomas’s poem “To the Woman Sitting Next to Me in the Fertility Clinic” captures that sense of isolation as well as the impulse to reach out to one another. Though the poem won’t appear in the magazine until later this year, we are sharing it online now to coincide with World Infertility Awareness Month. —Ed.

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To the Woman Sitting Next to Me in the Fertility Clinic
By Kelly Grace Thomas

Do you ever miss the woman
you used to be?

I once spent a year in Barcelona, broke
and tipsy on the seven verbs I knew.
Every day, I danced through Spanish
guitar and streets I couldn’t pronounce.
In El Born I convinced a man to give me
a pack of cigarettes, offering nothing
but a glance. One LA spring, I ran
a marathon, wrote a novel, worked
three jobs, and still said: More. I raced
sailboats in Jersey, the bay a chorus
of whitecaps, weather so strong it bent
the mast, tomorrow a truth
or dare—I had to keep winning.

Now I know what it’s like to lose, carry blame
and call it a body. Terrified of tampons,
travel plans. Wait every month
for three days of maybe, an exhaled egg.
We’ve been trying for seven hundred
and twenty-eight days. I know
what it’s like to beg for magic
and all you get is math. Another minus
in the trash.

Now I sit in this room, waiting, weighted
by the silence, the limits of science, of credit.
Compound interest on what I cannot.
All that power: past tense, paused.

What I mean is: Where is she
now?

This poem will appear in an upcoming issue of The Sun.