Growing Emptiness

I heard the song for the first time in a long time
while watching a murderer hide Easter eggs on TV.
At the end of the Sunday family hunt, he cracked
open someone’s skull, bloody yolk smearing the screen.

*

Didion mentioned the song in The Year of Magical Thinking.
She thought it gave the answer to the crossword clue,
“Sometimes I feel like a ______.”

That was the year I convinced myself
I was pregnant, downing prenatal vitamins
& chemo pills with wine.

*

Asked the question, the professor replied:
Life is a system in which proteins & nucleic acids allow
the structure to grow & reproduce. It's that growth & reproduction,
the ability to make more of yourself, that's important.

*

Grandma: If you don’t have children, you’ll die alone like a dog.
Me: I told you. We’re thinking of adopting.
Grandma: You adopt a dog not a child.

*

Correct answer to the crossword clue: nut.

*

Love,
You said my blood is your blood, my cells
are your cells. You spent your nights in a hospital chair
with an old man screaming in the hallway.
You woke up to unplug me from the wall.
You listened to my nightmares:

Labor lasted a week.
The child clawed its way out
attached its beak to my breast
& fed until I was blue.

*

Both a nut & an egg necessitate a growing emptiness.
Sometimes I wish I could fly. Like a bird up in the sky.
Neurons fire in disorder; I hear the lyrics over & over: I am a childless mother.

*

The murderer on TV has eight children.
Didion has a long dead daughter & husband.
I wanted a child the way a bird flies south toward a storm.

Barbara Schwartz is the author of the chapbook, Any Thriving Root (dancing girl press, 2017). A finalist for the 1913 Poetry Prize, her hybrid poetry manuscript, What Survives is the Fire, was selected for Boomerang Theater's First Flight New Play Festival, and has been included in the University of Miami's Holocaust Theater Catalog. Her poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, Upstreet, Nimrod, Carolina Quarterly, Quiddity, and elsewhere. She is an education consultant and lives with her family in Brooklyn, NY.