Miracle chasers

This is a poem for the women sitting alone in the fertility clinic at 6:45am.

New York city.

For your early morning.

For waiting behind the caged window until the time comes to give your name cold and

cracking voice.

No coffee.

For the scrubs you wear before you go to your own gig.

Panty-less and exposed and tired.

For the business bags you carry with the laptop edges sticking out.

For the loss of the man who isn’t beside you because he never was.

For your diligence, determination to build a home, alone.

This one’s for the girls, for us.

For the needles who gave us life but never made us a wife.

For our pride, our broken, our 9-5 and the bathroom trips to poke ourselves with endless tips.

Gestation is about 40 weeks, but have we been doing this for what feels like decades now?

They start count at “week zero” so we are in minus 16 now but started at minus 624 or

maybe when the gestation of an idea starts -the spark -when was that?

How do you mark time spent when it hasn’t started?

One day this will be a poem for a baby.

One day the manifestation of this all may turn into real energy that isn’t measured in grief

but in joy and cells.

One day the business bags we carry will hold a pacifier and a rattle and maybe a diaper or

two, but until then- it’s me and you girl, alone in the waiting room at this ungodly hour,

doing the Lord’s work,

and a man’s work,

all the damn work,

before the other work starts,

internal and physical,

and alone,

together.