by Dorsia Smith Silva

You do not ask me. You just turn  

on the ignition, ready to amputate  

my words: another miscarriage,  

another $10,000 for in vitro, another  

doctor’s office. I flood your bones  

with the forgotten language of adoption.   

You flex your tight mouth as the minutes  

drag like a charred oak odor, until there  

is a double line of parting leveled like a  

pendulum. When I see my body’s dance  

invitation to hurt, the whirl of tests, double  

kick and headstand of hormones, leap to a  

black fleck on a sonogram, I injure this  

pas de deux. This is the final slaughter,  

while I dismember your want through me.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dorsía Smith Silva is a Professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras. Her poetry has been published or is forthcoming in Portland Review, Stoneboat, Storyscape, Pidgeonholes, Eclectica Magazine, and elsewhere. She is also the editor of Latina/Chicana Mothering and the co-editor of six books. She is currently finishing her first poetry book. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Rachel Singel is an Assistant Professor at the University of Louisville. Rachel grew up on a small farm in Charlottesville, Virginia. She received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Virginia in 2009 and a Masters of Fine Arts in Printmaking from the University of Iowa in 2013. Rachel has participated in residencies at the Penland School of Crafts, the Venice Printmaking Studio, Internazionale di Grafica Venezia, Art Print Residence in Barcelona, Spain, and Wharepuke Print Studios in New Zealand. She has studied non-toxic printmaking at the Grafisk Eksperimentarium studio in Andalusia and will continue her research at Proyecto’ace, an Artist-in-Residence Program in Buenos Aires, Argentina in Summer 2021. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and represented in private, public, and museum collections.