Mid-Cycle (reworked)

In the clothing chain store my unborn children
crowd my consciousness like ghosts,
tug at my heartstrings with the delicate determined strength
of a baby’s kick in the womb.

I wait to pay, not for a small skirt
stitched with the shy pink heads of flowers,
but for a four-year old best (only) boy’s vest,
a bull and rider patterned dark across its flaming front.

Yearning in a queue full of strangers,
I feel the secret spirals of my ovaries pulse,
then a prick of pain, sharp as the Epidural in my back at the birth,
as the ovum, unseeded, is released.

Another possibility
yields.

4.11

3 poems in Foliate Oak (see URL)

http://www.foliateoak.uamont.edu/