Ex vitro 

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​​​​​Did you get to choose? question lobbed 

innocently following this more

or less organized cognitive processing  

of reason yes I filled a swimming   

pool a vat pearl yellow brimmed 

sticky with non-Newtonian polymer 

like the goop children squeeze. Mentally 

I dived in multiplied all the sperm

I’d ever seen in small quantities

pitcher or cup a roommate who kept

it in jars in our basement reckoned 

with that word—choose—conjuring

a grand surprise a certain randomness

or bravery in the right light. My 

one-day child was (and is) a mystery 

but I’ll remind that any dad or mom 

can end up being the same. You fall

into the penis of an actual sociopath 

as I have creeps who are now dads

and while I get the appeal of much 

genetic material stored in one place

discretely from its teeming origins 

bodies of dicks and hands I promise

that like you—if you have children—

I’m like you

I too exercise choice​​            

I chose.

Made possible (Dear Ortho)

When I was born, you were younger than most American brides. Not long since doctors

guinea pigged you

on poor women in Puerto Rico or the F.D.A. called you a lifestyle drug or the courts

built your legality 

on the rights of married people (of course). How you emerged from the male

medical mind

a beacon of synthetic hormonal freedom I’ll never know, as you shifted power womb-ward,

shifted it home

to that hardy organ, pear-sized, a change purse, a fist. Those of us with wombs 

guarded their entry, 

consensually, because for all time, we bore the risk of any coupling, lost every power 

play we tried, and let’s

acknowledge, I had sex against my will more than once, because of most of us do,

are made to. The consensus 

of a generation of mothers grown up Roe-less: beware. Mine dutifully warned of the child

as ruinous agent,

child itself and not the brutish circumstances of her raising, so in my fifteenth year I quit

ovulating by choice

in the staunch tradition of a human mind in any womb-filled body. A pill for college, 

for fulfillment, beyond 

the journey of egg or uterine lining. The Jeffersonian word, “self-evident” for my Puritan

dedication to you,

how I dialed and punched tablets from their compact; but even then, knowing if errant cells 

stuck provisionally, 

neither a man’s scant genetics nor loathing disregard of the state could compel my body,

some call this body

my property, to birth a child. But you and I live inside arguments of long ago. This morning 

I read about your sister, 

pill that clears wombs, for abortion or just miscarriage, a prescription most pharmacies here 

no longer fill.  

How much time left for you? Forgotten while I had rights, all you gave me, no mere position

or career but a whole 

person made possible, phrase apt for me though not my child, the body I imagined 

belonged to her.

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