from HARVARD REVIEW ONLINE
Hand and foot, from head to toe, the body we know like the back of our hands, we say, patting our palms since we don’t know back from front, don’t know our ass from our elbow. I help Liz find her vagina to use a tampon her first time, Brooke tells me what to expect during a blow job, Jeff says to let the funneled force of Coors hold open my throat, a stranger gives me Valium when I reach for her hand on a plane. Now Depo, condoms, the Pill make way for FSH and BBT, how the sperm that makes boys goes faster, dies sooner, like boys, says Joanna, holding her little girl.
Laura’s fingers flick to show how the dye popped open
her fallopian tubes. Rita Mae says a forty-eight-year-old’s sperm
could cause autism, Esther says kids are nice but they
do ruin your life. Billy’s friend announces,
out of nowhere, I am so happy with my decision
not to have children and none of us believe her.
X shopped around for the perfect Jewish eggs, Y injected her belly, evenings, with little syringes, the bruises blooming black, now purple, now yellow and green.
During implantation the nurses played soft eighties hits—
I bought a ticket to the world, 1 know I know I know this much is true. She says in the ultrasound her ovaries looked like bunches of grapes. Z has a baby at forty-two—
in vino she and her husband joke, in vitro a no-no in the Roman Catholic Church. Encyclicals entitled Donum Vitae, Dignitas Personae say why: the human person is objectively deprived of its proper perfection: namely, that of being the result and fruit of a conjugal act. The church, thank god, is soothing, confident, ready to clear all this up. Life a gift, human persons dignified. And we, most of us, are perfect, because fathers put their penises in moms.