Reproductive Counseling

By Morgan Nelson

1

when you die you can put your ashes

inside me

I am used to being a home for the dead.

whale song, high hums and long beats

a cascade of poached bodies and

things that

cannot grow.

there's space for us beached ones who

are made to create without creation.

whisper salt streams and sticky mud

bodies bloated with expectations

give me

yours. give me algae and ashes and love and the

movement of you, bursting with hope and

completion.

it is easy to feel complete when you are made

for land.

2

Being

Large

But

Feeling

Small

Like

There's

Fifteen

Hundred

Miles

Of

Ocean

Above

Pressing

Down

You

Are

The

Whale

But

The

Ocean

Is

Not

For

You.

3

I know how to feel like an animal but not how to survive in nature. I never watched the SeaWorld documentary but I assume somehow the whales survive anyway. Life tends towards life and the planet keeps spinning. But your whale body is a carcass, a graveyard of months where nature forgot to perpetuate survival. You are a calendar of a red sea parted by no one for nothing, you are the sea, waves lapping in repetition to remind you you are you are you are

When I was twenty three I helped my grandmother shower. It was the first time I saw her naked, and in the small yellow bathroom from my childhood, where I once took forty five minute showers and listened to Top 40 radio under a constant warm stream, three generations of women turned on the faucet and bathed the eldest. My grandmother was dying but we didn't know for sure yet. There was cancer in her ovaries, the same ovaries that helped grow five children and only failed her once, now failed her twice. She worried aloud that she couldn't give her husband a good sex life anymore. Her body crumbled from within the worries of her mind. I could feel in the moment the loss of childhood and the loss of child, the bridging instead into a fabric of womanhood, the way that all women throughout time are connected, through our bodies and how they let us down.

Loss is not the right word because I have not felt it. Loss is the experience of having, of owning, of missing the view of the ocean you once dipped your feet into each morning. There is no grief for those who have never seen the ocean. There are no words for nature without mother. Above water there are bookstores filled with babies and parks swinging toddlers and Instagram for each moment of where life is happening. Under water there is only water, weighty pressure, and your ears popping when you hear

don't stress we just got lucky it will happen when you least expect it you can't think too much about it we don't know the role of stress on it I prefer to say reproductive counseling it will be okay it will happen have you tried this have you tried have you tried have you tried just not thinking about it?

Morgan works in a bookshop all day, during which she mostly fantasizes about what she is reading at the time. Poetry offers an outlet for all the problems adulthood throws at her. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in *Catch Magazine*. She lives in the Twin City with her husband and two cats.

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