Planetary
Molly Sutton Kiefer
There’s a smear I try not to hate,
two brown moons in overlap,
a smear I used to celebrate
when unprompted, but now,
no bleeding on my own.
One star for bleeding,
four moons for sugars,
a slip into a planet, a planet
for an egg. I make these trades
in the dim bathroom,
I hold them in my sweaty palm.
I keep reading into my body,
peeling back pockets. Everything
means something. Vertigo-fuzz,
stomach unloving
of food. I feel so often-angry,
as if I could punch the part
of myself that is broken.
There’s a smear I try not to hate,
two brown moons in overlap,
a smear I used to celebrate
when unprompted, but now,
no bleeding on my own.
One star for bleeding,
four moons for sugars,
a slip into a planet, a planet
for an egg. I make these trades
in the dim bathroom,
I hold them in my sweaty palm.
I keep reading into my body,
peeling back pockets. Everything
means something. Vertigo-fuzz,
stomach unloving
of food. I feel so often-angry,
as if I could punch the part
of myself that is broken.
Working notes
Just before my wedding in 2007, I was diagnosed with an infertility condition called Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS). It certainly didn't mean I couldn't have children, at least probably not, but when it came time, I had to have treatments, which made me increasingly sick and desperate. I would take pregnancy tests by the fistful, track my temperatures obsessively, read websites with worst case scenarios and hope so hard I could feel it throughout my body. My daughter came on a cycle that shouldn't have worked out, but I suppose it's true sometimes, that things happen when you least expect them. I met my husband that way too. And our son, who is due in just ten days as I write this, and will be born by the time these poems are published, was actually, technically, an accident: I'd started the medication that would jump-start the bleeding bit of my cycles, but not the ovulation, and somehow, this girl with an infertility condition was able to make a baby with her partner naturally. I don't regret missing out on the cycles of (pre)occupation that would have been another string of treatments: I feel ever-blessed.
About the author
Molly Sutton Kiefer’s chapbook The Recent History of Middle Sand Lake won the 2010 Astounding Beauty Ruffian Press Poetry Award. Her second chapbook, City of Bears, will be published in 2013 by dancing girl press. Her work has appeared in Harpur Palate, Women’s Studies Quarterly, WomenArts Quarterly, Berkeley Poetry Review, you are here, Gulf Stream, Cold Mountain Review, Southampton Review, and Permafrost, among others. She earned her MFA from the University of Minnesota, was selected for the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series, serves as poetry editor to Midway Journal, and runs Balancing the Tide: Motherhood and the Arts | An Interview Project. She currently lives in Red Wing with her husband, daughter, and newborn son, and is at work on a manuscript on (in)fertility. More can be found at mollysuttonkiefer.com.