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Pelvic Ultrasound 
by Anne Barngrover

                  –Ovaries: from Latin: ovarium, literally egg

I’ve waited to see you for years now
but when you light up the black screen

like night-shining clouds, I become
nervous and turn to the side. In static,

sound waves form you as sand does
to shipwrecked glass. How is it

that you and I always manage to live
among radicals—spiders electric

with poison, cat who sashays indoors
after a burglary, dirt clod that morphs

into a cricket frog? A gecko scurries pink
as sticky tack along the bathroom wall.

How it twirls to an embryo in my palm.
It’s expensive to get a good look

at you, though you’re not mine
to interpret what’s wrong. If anything

it’s a hypnotic display or a book
we hurled in the road. Once we broke

a bush with a loaf of bread, thrown.
Once we broke a bush with car’s hood.

The next day its bumper was smeared
with indigo. Any woman knows how

many colors can present themselves
in blood. Something must’ve happened

to make you go rogue. We used to connect
fragments of ice crystals. We needed chaos

and carnivores. Even wolves can change
the way a river runs, so what have we done

to cast biology into anarchy and fade
from our distinctive glow? Oh, you shells

along my vertebrae and the vertebrae
of my mother, you have hidden from me

an ocean’s depth, you of lunar odes
and filament, gossamer and tendril.

I can’t see much in the dark,
but I’ve felt your whispered pull.

We all are in need of rewilding.
You don’t have to do this alone.

"Pelvic Ultrasound" by Anne Barngrover. Used by permission of the poet.