We had looked for you for days, for weeks, the probe
between my thighs by then a practiced pinch.
Before you were a twinkle —
that’s the saying, but should better be
before you were a sliver in your mother’s
side, a hiccup, or a sting. I saw you
pebble on the monitor, my neck lifting
off the sterile pillow, to tilt toward the TV
— your brother entertained by goldfish
crackers in his stroller tray beside me.
Trans-vaginal made me think of trans-Siberian, some
wilderness of train tracks, wind whipping over barren
wastes. Or of trans-Atlantic, the swollen silver bellies
of the planes glinting off the surface of the sea. You
journeyed toward us slowly — at least, the half of you I held.
It was like peering in the brain to watch a thought at its
inception, a poem struggling for form before its words.
Maybe I had wanted just to keep you to myself, the way
some memories are kept beautiful unsaid. I held you longer
than I should, when all the body asked of me — release.
Jen Stewart Fueston lives in Longmont, Colorado. Her work has appeared in a wide variety of journals, most recently Ruminate, Mom Egg Review, and Pilgrimage. She has taught writing at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as well as internationally in Hungary, Turkey, and Lithuania.