Learning to ride, falling down, getting back on
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It’s the final moment — the tugging — that’s the worst. A sucking deep within the pelvis, where the body contracts as if to cling to that tiny growth. Everything seems to fight for life, the way a moth with wings bent and tattered by the cat still stretches its proboscis to an offered cap of water. The uterus does not easily let go. My body’s instinct is deeply woven, dense as the bird’s nest the house painter found beneath the eaves. He gasped at the eggs in their bowl of twigs, cupped it in his sunburned, paint-speckled hands, placed it back before dusk, but the birds never returned.
SeSe Geddes
I’m writing first to complain about your recent dearth of poems. As an amateur poet, I always look to the poems in each issue, and I’m often rewarded with lines that are challenging but also understandable and beautiful — a combination lacking in much of the poetry printed these days.
Mainly, though, I want to thank you for the one poem you chose for February 2015: “Abortion,” by SeSe Geddes. Over the years I’ve noticed the deft way you juxtapose a photograph with an essay, a short story with an interview. “Abortion” follows an essay [“Apartment 5,” by Kelly Grey Carlisle] in which the difficult choice to end a pregnancy is treated sympathetically. Coming after that, the poem got me in my gut, almost as if I were that desperate woman parting with the tiny life inside her.