Three Poems

Single, Thirty-Something Female

In my early twenties, I read an article in a magazine about increasing numbers of unmarried women in their forties, fifties, sixties, like an exposé or an epidemic. I always thought that by the time I was forty, I’d be married and I wouldn’t have acne anymore. But here I am, over forty—I still have acne and I never got married. Those words remain embedded in my memory, so shaken had I been to imagine that same fate might await me. A decade ago, I would have told you I'd have children by now. It was never a question, only an inevitability. I longed for love and marriage, for stability, for vows and promises. Motherhood would have been the happy byproduct of my dreams come true. I would have gladly consigned myself to that fate had my future manifested in the ways I desired it to. But wanting a thing only drove it further from my grasp. Loving men has been like watching fireworks, has been an endless stream of violent explosions and trying to remember how beautiful it all was after nothing but ash remains. It became harder and harder to believe in fairytale endings where I would be anything but alone ever after. It is a strange thing to wonder about the life I would have made for myself if I could have chosen it, if everything I’d ever clung to hadn’t withered in my grasp. Perhaps if I saw myself as a mother more than a wife, it wouldn't matter, alone or lonely, I, like many before me, would do it anyway, without asking for help, without waiting for it to arrive. Even still the idea of children glimmers enticingly in my mind sometimes, a mirage shifting on the desert horizon. But the closer I get, the joy of it always burns off like so much haze in the sunshine. Instead I feel the relief that I did not get what I wanted when I wanted it, that it gave me the freedom to decide to want other things. I still dream of love, imagine futures that surprise me. I still leave every door I walk through open behind me. Just not this one. There have never been any clear instructions for how to wrest satisfaction from a world so good at withholding. The only thing I knew to do for so long was keep revising the plan after each failed attempt and starting over. Now, I’m learning to forgive myself for feeling old, for growing tired of beginning again. I’m learning that alone does not have to mean unhappy. And when I think about what I might have had if I’d had my way, I no longer think I’m missing anything.

Biological Clock

My biological clock is ticking. I can hear it in the rhythmic trilling of the crickets hiding in their tall grasses. I hear it in the tapping of a spoon against glazed ceramic, slowly stirring honey into a hot liquid. I hear it in the pattering rain falling steadily on a sloped roof and sliding down the asphalt shingles to the gutter. Sometimes it is a dancing rhythm, a rumba, tango, waltz, two-step—at other times a dirge, a marching rhythm for a processional of the dead.

It is like any clock, quietly doing business in its place until one day, in a blanket of stillness, you notice it ticking. It is then that you turn on another noise to stop yourself from hearing its constant, ceaseless toil. But every day from then on, when the silence visits, the ticking returns. It was there, clinging to the edge of your awareness all this time like a slug on a tomato leaf, a single slimy touch away from noticing. Why is the ticking of a clock so disturbing? It is a reminder, one might say, of the forward motion of time, its nature to never relent. Time ticks away and all things are left behind, the clock ticking will outlast us all. Or perhaps because the ticking is steady and sure, which none of us are, which nothing in life ever is.

Not even clocks really, which die sometimes, too. Sometimes sudden, a brief moment of failure and the ticking ends; and should you be lucky enough to witness such a death, you'd hold your breath a moment wondering if you’d finally outlasted time itself—the utter silence left behind by the stilled ticking would feel intensely intimate, a private moment of immortality. Or otherwise, a clock's death is slow and steady. It first becomes unreliable, counting seconds twice, resting for whole minutes on end. The clock becomes a problem to solve, a patient to cure, an enemy to defeat, the clock becomes everything, the whole center of your awareness, always checking to see if still it ticks. The clock is dying but you keep fixing it and fixing it, resetting the hands to their proper positions. And when it dies, it hangs on the wall and reminds you every day that you are out of time. You begin to hear phantom ticks, imagining the clock still works and turning again and again you see it, dead. And this too is an intimacy for you, for the clock. It was a part of you once, a thing that lived and measured.

What if I had more time, I wonder? What choices would I make without a ticking clock counting down the days I have left to decide? Some days it is a war I must win against the clock, to declare my intention to fail before I meet my failure, to turn misfortune to success. But I've weighed far more than time on my scales, and always I come up wanting for desire. I've said this again and again: how many times I've calculated, accounting for the variables. But time is not a variable, it is a constant path ahead. And always I am moving forward toward the day when the choice will no longer be mine.

Sometimes I think about how much time I may have left before the final bell is rung. Sometimes I wonder if time will make me change my mind. And then, will it be too late, will I be out of time? I keep hearing the clock tick, sometimes reverberating echoes and other times a quiet whisper. Lately, I have been turning down the noises to listen to it ticking, taking comfort in its constancy, learning unforgiveness from its unwavering plodding march. The clock, like an old friend, a flashlight, a mirror, showing me things I couldn't see alone, in the dark, without a way to measure the weight of this decision.

Here, it says and indicates a single moment. Forever lies just beyond this point.

The Mother Inside Me

"In every man there is a child. In every woman there is a mother."
—Santosh Kalwar

Inside my hollow belly she coils my womb,
awaits its filling, she is patient for my mistake.

Inside I feel her alien polyp suckered
to my locked and hidden spaces. She longs

to hold with my arms, feed with my breasts;
she feasts with my eyes on the smallness of infancy.

The mother inside me is a hostile invasion of need,
is a peal of vicious laughter at each finished poem.

How long did she build her subtle residence
before I noticed her presence? Inside me,

she burns, kindled by the pilot light of hope
that has kept me from ending my worst days early.

A whispering voice in my ear, when I think of the future,
she reminds me of the endurance of decision. I can feel

her hunger bubbling inside me, but I cannot stomach her desires.
Creation is a violence I couldn’t bear to inflict—

not for loneliness, not for need, not even for love. Inside me,
the mother starves but does not wither, the mother fails

but does not relent. She is not a thing that I could kill,
only a secret I must smother. The mother inside me

is serpent shaped, slithering up my esophagus.
She opens my mouth to speak. Instead, I scream.

We are not so different, the mother and me.
We both want something we cannot have.

This piece was featured in Volume 2, Issue 1. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.