Statistics
“An estimated 23 million miscarriages occur every year worldwide, translating to 44 pregnancy losses each minute.”
- Quenby, Siobhan “Miscarriage matters: the epidemiological, physical, psychological, and economic costs of early pregnancy loss”, National Library of Medicine.
When I felt that twist, the first blood, my throat filled
with a hum and a whisper like drowning,
while a new mother in Berlin rested a plush bunny on a
nameless grave marker in a cemetery full of star children.
In Tokyo, she blanched spinach and simmered squash, the heat
on her eyelids, one hand pressed where she’d felt the kicking.
A girl in Iran felt her baby pulled out with suction
after the abortion pill failed, that cramp and scrape, like
a woman in South Africa, her fetus smothered by HIV
toxins, that swelling and burst, all primary colors.
In São Paulo, she placed socked feet in stirrups before
her eight week ultrasound, smoothed the wrinkled drape
and in Egypt, she tried to deliver at home during the fifty-day
wind while sand settled into the cracks of her building.
A different woman found the receipt for pink cotton
pajamas, size newborn, read the return policy.
Someone else rocked in the wooden chair for hours,
her mouth open, her palms up, her arms empty.
I was finished at the hospital.
The needle bulged the blue vein in my left hand,
that burn, and the surgical nurse brushed gray wisps
from her temples, touched my shoulder, and said,
you can always try for another
but all of us, us mothers, are living this.
