Covet

by Emily Schulten

I lied when I said that it all went back to normal. 

It’s like the knife is pulled from my belly every time I see a friend’s belly grow round, see her gentle palm rest on the notch the growing child—the growing child—makes between her breasts and the new life. 

And then I’m hemorrhaging all over again. It spills and pools at my feet and I walk around this way, smiling, doting, congratulating, arms full of yellow dahlias, pink hydrangeas, and red anemones of celebration, all the time trying to pretend it’s not puddling, to figure out how to clean the blood from my feet, from my soles where it embeds into the crevices, the lifelines of my footsteps, how to hide the tracks on the carpet, the tile, the pavement that look like my alive son’s ink-stamped hospital prints. 

I try to forget him. And then I hate myself, so I promise the child who grew in the wrong part of my body and left my body clutching the tattered tube (a ghost, an asymmetry) that I will never forget him. I will suffer forever the outline of his tiny waxing crescent body as it grows inside my shadow, quiet and loving and tender and always with his soft hand outline on my chest, my calf, my hip, my shoulder. The longing chokes in my throat after everyone else has gone to sleep. I try to sleep, too. Content, I guess, just to be muted.

My husband has forgotten. He delights in the child we have, the one who grows in the sunshine, the one whom everyone can see becoming a boy. The one in whom I should also delight without burden.

But then there’s a new grainy black ultrasound on Facebook, a toddler in a Big Brother t-shirt, a letter in the mailbox announcing (so loudly!) a new addition. And someone else’s family is growing. Will grow in the sunshine while half of me is confined to this shadow. The half with the phantom of my fallopian tube. I reach down deep to feel the gladness. These alive babies, they are the first thing I have ever been starkly aware of coveting. It comes in like an avalanche and I’m buried, frozen in the yearning. I want what they have: the chorus of cries, the dizziness of the crowded kitchen, the scheming of siblings. 

After the ectopic pregnancy—that is, after I didn’t stop bleeding, after admittance to the emergency room, after they told me my baby was strong and growing in the wrong spot, after they told me his heart rate, after being rushed into surgery, after they carefully carved away and out my growing child and burst, frayed fallopian tube—we tried IVF again. 

We failed. 

Two months later and for the first time unassisted, I was pregnant. It felt like redemption. It felt like foreboding. Soon, it felt dangerous. Like this life I was owed might also cost me mine. Again. 

In the same emergency room, in the same dark department, on the same cold bed, in front of the same screen turned askew, a quiet woman looked at the growing life, which was whispering instead of thumping, a tune instead of an orchestra. There were no answers then, only waiting. Waiting for one of three things: a baby like the one I still felt living inside me in the shadows; or a miscarriage; or another ticking clock, counting down the seconds I had until something— my almost child— burst inside leaving me with seconds to cut away more of my body or die. 

When I see a new announcement, I have to look so hard for that place where— really, genuinely I am happy for another woman. A deserving woman. Someone I know well or barely but who is rejoicing and should swim deep in that gladness. But then, it’s like I am dead, walking—no, mostly lying—inside of a body that’s brain does not care to turn on. All I can muster is to move along the tracks I have worn from the kitchen to my alive son’s bedroom to the kitchen and out the front door, to be sure my alive son has what he needs. Stir the grits, heat the skillet, fry the beans, pour the milk, lift the child, buckle the seat, sing and sing again, Sally go round the sun, Sally go round the moon, Sally go round the chimney pot on a Sunday afternoon.

Emily Schulten is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Easy Victims to the Charitable Deceptions of Nostalgia, the 2023 White Pine Press Poetry Prize winner, and The Way a Wound Becomes a Scar, a 2023 Eric Hoffer Award Finalist. A 2024 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow, her work appears in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, and Prairie Schooner, among others. She is the current Poet Laureate of Key West. She is a professor of English and creative writing and the director of CFK Poetics at The College of the Florida Keys.