Two Poems by Kate Welsh
Eggs
The weird white viscosity
of them, their smell, the way
the yolks coat the tongue—
they make my stomach turn.
When I eat them, I think:
near miss. I think: potential,
easily over.
*
Recently, the doctor has been looking
at my ovaries. I mean: she shoved
a camera inside of me to get a glimpse
of them. Then some tech, hunched over
stilled images from the ultrasound,
magnified my organs and counted
the cysts like stars. Eventually he gave up
and wrote “innumerable.”
*
Grocery store eggs come from hens
who have never seen roosters.
In the name of mass production,
scientists have genetically altered them,
squelched the hormone that tells them
to do more than lay eggs: to perch,
warm, hatch a new batch of hungry chicks
to care for, to dote on. Motherly instinct
neatly excised. Instead:
An abundance of hopeless yolks
falling onto a conveyor belt
of cartons bound for a gigantic refrigerator.
*
When the doctor wondered if I had
any questions it shocked me how quickly
I asked what my eggs were good for.
*
The doctor says I should “get started”
sooner rather than later. But my mother
reminds me that she was well into her thirties
when she had me, had my brother; that when
she was pregnant with my sister at 41,
the doctor couldn’t believe
she’d had any babies at all.
Good genes, my mother says.
Good luck, the doctor says.
*
What might happen: my body will
refuse to ovulate, despite medication
or acupuncture or prayers. My period will
become a sign of failure, not relief. Sex
will cease to be a pleasure. A box
of pregnancy tests in the cabinet under
the bathroom sink will turn orange
from the old plumbing’s steady dripping.
It will be urgently recommended
I spend thousands on fertility treatments
that send my hormones raging. I will learn
to use words like chorionic and ectopic.
I will press my body to comply.
Or this: in my fallopian tubes, sperm
from the man I love will meet a rare egg.
The zygote will find my endometrium
hospitable and make a home there
for nine long months. I will grow round
in all new places. I will worry and worry.
Either way: maybe.
Or maybe only an endless hunger.
*
On the bottom shelf
of my refrigerator
there is a plastic carton
with five eggs left.
Failed little things.
They’ve been there too long.
How do I choke them down?
It seems a shame
to let them
go to waste.
Karkinos
For a while, the breathing tube works just fine.
My goggles don’t fog. I float on the surface
of the ocean, staring down and down at things
I don’t understand: a lone octopus disappearing
into a forest of coral, crabs moving
with mechanical precision, schools of silver fish
sending up a chorus of small bubbles.
There is something familiar
about the rattle down there, full of life—
or maybe something more like a refusal
of death. In your hospital room after surgery,
your voice was hoarse and clipped from intubation
and vomiting caused by the pain you hate
to admit to: like being seasick on land, you said.
When you came home, when you could,
we would walk to the end of the block, that’s it,
and you’d return winded, wheezing. Only one
whole lung will do that. Still, now,
in your breath, there’s a catch, a click. I listen
for it, both reassurance and remembrance,
a new thing to fear the absence of. A bigger
wave. Saltwater over the tongue. I come up
for air, a gasp of it: no more plastic at the mouth.
Kate Welsh is a poet living in Brooklyn, NY. She holds a BA from Barnard College and an MFA from Warren Wilson College, where she was the Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellow in 2021.
