Maybe you're not the featherweight champ
of all the cutthroat combat sports
(fifteen and pregnant
again)

but you'd convert your ring corner
into a slaughterhouse

before you'd inquire after human kindness.


In the humdrum flare outside the clinic
you wait for a ride, feel the spill at the tipping point

trickle down your inner thigh
as you bask in the post-industrial particulate

on your skin, ash
into a jasmine pot's bituminous anchorage

so tacky it glows in a habitat that spent your body
long before it finished growing.


Lynn! they lied to you

don't you know?
Your womb will be the first thing to heal.

What you smell is pleasure, not the rot of the thing
amid the waste.

You will have babies.
You will write poems about flowers that turn on in darkness.


About This Poem
"I've written this scene once before, in prose, but telling it in poetry felt at once more private and more expansive. This poem is for my daughters (to read when they are a bit older)."
-Lynn Melnick

About Lynn Melnick
Lynn Melnick is the author of "If I Should Say I Have Hope" (YesYes Books, 2012). She teaches at 92nd Street Y and lives in Brooklyn, N.Y.

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The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day[at]poets.org.


(c) 2016 Lynn Melnick. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate