Five Months Pregnant, I Trip on a Sidewalk in DC

photo by publisher

for Walter

I make a kind of Oh!
A stupid ingenue
of a sound, a surprise
present of a sound. 

I am sprawled
in front of a house
that is not my own
in the thick of a city
where I am only a visitor. 

I wait for blood
to polkadot my hands,
seep through my jeans,
run down my legs. Then
a man with a dog stops
& my husband says thanks
& I say I’m fine. It’s fine.
I am spectacle enough. 

I walk again toward
the University no longer
worried that we’ll be late—
instead afraid that the last
sound you heard was a quiet
kind of surrender, that the last
thing you felt was the thud
of a body hitting the ground.