Caitlin Dwyer
PENELOPE PREGNANT
He’s going to leave me. With every kick
the ground drops out, as when an airplane
lurches, suddenly loses altitude.
Two feet, or twenty. I grip the seat.
Next to me the bearded man is singing.
He craves this feeling, its weightlessness,
the body briefly lifted from its shell
and hanging above itself like a skinned shade.
I clutch my aching wrists. I solve the crossword
in ink and tuck it into the seat. Later,
I will walk until the kicking soothes, wander
among fog-shapes, skitter of snakes and
morning birds, and feel the thin air burn.
When we first married, he used to walk with me.
Where are we going? he would ask. The ruins
of the temple, the ridge with its vistas
of curling shore and wavery, metallic sea.
We’re just walking, I replied, and now
he does not come. There is no place to jump
into the waves and feel the brief glory
of weightlessness. There is only my belly
like a carbuncle beneath sore fingers, knuckles
numb from picking out knots, and the stitch
of my breath, which grows tauter every day.
I cannot climb as high as I once did.
I cannot any more cast ripples in the wells
with my mere reflection, cause a riot
with my undone hair. The child
has come between us. Which is to say,
my body has. When the plane lurches
I grab his hand, and he grins. Wasn’t that fun?
But I have already fallen out of my old self,
am wandering shadowless among the hills,
my son a bright spot in my belly,
and the swollen moon falling out, out,
tugging me up with it into an unfamiliar sky.