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V o l . 12 N o . 2 Michelle Bonczek Evory
The uterus is a fickle vessel In the bay, oysters open and close, an eye, a mouth, lipped tight. Like a bivalve, an ovary does its thing, stringing out pearl after pearl, bubble after bubble, silent speech balloons evaporating over our mouths like smoke from a train. Back to the sky you go, forever forward we chug. If I had a baby, maybe I’d name her Pearl, small girl emerging from the shell of me. But, as you must have sensed, I don’t have a baby and it is such a loss this not having someone to name. As a teenager I’d compile lists of names in the back of notebooks, a girl column, a boy column. I’d swirl them in my mouth like fine wine tasting every essence, every suggestion. Avery, Apple, Emerson, Plum, for a long time my grandmother’s name, Aleksandra, or, a combination of both my grandmothers, Annazandra, Zandy for short. Pearl…bubble…cloud… This week, on a flight bound for Dallas, a heart meant to stay in Seattle was left behind on the plane. This is what we can do today: fly pieces of ourselves around the world. Implant parts of ourselves into someone else’s body. Leave our hearts absentmindedly behind. Puff…Puff…Puff. Last year, a nineteen-year-old who tried to kill herself with a bullet to the head and survived, received the first ever face transplant. We wait to see if her body rejects it. There is never a guarantee an embryo will implant itself in a womb, let alone one face take to another. Years ago, leaving the mountainous Pacific Northwest for the flat Midwest was like leaving my heart on a plane meant to stay in Seattle. It was like trading one face for another. I’ve never stopped longing for those rainforests, volcanos, moose knee high in a river, drinking the river, pissing the river. Longing to replace tornado warnings with tsunamis, to look out over the bay water and see oysters opening and closing, my ovaries stringing out pearl, pearl, pearl.
Uluhe
Jim Thiele
