I have to start with something about fruit. The book calls you, as you are now, a blueberry and a lemon. An apple. A navel orange in my belly.

Fruit goes on the counter or in the wire basket on the top of the refrigerator. Lemons in the crisper. Fruit doesn't move or want, unless cut, and then it might bleed, like sap or a pierced yolk. It doesn't hurt. Saying orange seed is not the same as saying elbow. Fruit is always the right amount of sweet and when it is not, or when it softens too far, throw it away. Say, Fine. Say orange seed. The sweetness of fingernail and eyelid is too slippery to whisper.

*

I have dreams my brother goes to Brazil the night you are born. I have dreams he takes a night train with someone named Shelby, a Shelby with straight shoulders and tan knees, a Shelby I have never known before this dream. Later, my brother might laugh and we might try to think of all the Shelbys we have known. Where this Shelby comes from. But for now, my brother and his friend Shelby are leaving. He says they have to go on the train. To Brazil. He's sorry. I tell him I only want to call. To send a picture. I wake up no more lost than when I fell asleep.  Pillows like islands on the floor. The alarm clock on the dresser, all red and moving.

*

Every Christmas and New Year's, my dad puts out a plate of cold shrimp arranged in arches around cocktail sauce. Pink and jointed, the shrimp go wet and limp and then limper. Something like used fishing tackle. Earth worms. Flailing, gapping. So much mouth. My brother will still eat the shrimp hours later, even when they no longer curve. I imagine they swim and flap through his stomach.

When I read you are the size of a shrimp, it is the first time I think about parasites. About takeover. Loss. Being swallowed. About the agency of a shrimp. About the way a plum or an orange hangs on the branch. In the guilt of this thinking, an invisible tree grows from my spine. Branches of shrimp and citrus might wave from my shoulders. Be still. To whom I say this is a mystery. 

*

There is a dream about Aaron, the boy I loved first—I don't know if the man I love now understands this. The book says this sort of thing is to be expected, though no one keeps watch. I am in an auditorium, a hallway, a parking lot and he comes over. Oh, we say together. Oh. You. I'm sorry, I tell him. I'm sorry for everything. People chatter. I reach for his arm. The sleeve is plaid and then gone. There isn't even smoke. You are not there.  

*

A woman sends my husband a message of congratulations. A former boss I have never met, the woman has a new son who was a twin for a while, but now he is all that is left. She writes to tell my husband what I should do, how she wants me to stay home after you are born, how I must cherish my time. She writes with an expertise that shames me.

We are in bed tangled in sheets and computers when I read her note, and I can almost see the threads separating. The untying of the knots we have arranged.  In this moment, I hate her, and I am afraid. Our plans might be tree branches or the shadows of tree branches.

*

My mother says I should write you a letter. I laugh when she says this. Her cheeks redden and she looks down, confused, does the thing she does with her shoulders. I don't tell her that I have nothing to say to you, that writing to you is writing a letter to my ear, to my liver, to my lungs. Only I know these better.

I don't have the name for the pulse that pushes toward my belly, for the physicality of devotion. For the citrus. Floating somewhere in a strange belly-sea.

*

One of my sisters sends a blanket of giraffes and lions, elephants and zebras. She says it took her hours to put together. She wants to know if I like the colors, if I get that she knows I like the zoo. It is in the closet on the top shelf by the winter coats with the Winnie-the-Pooh towel and the children's books.

All our things and plans will explode like confetti, the closets will burst, and we'll be covered in paper and pulp and somehow, you'll be in the middle of the mess. Even as the wet and the paper stick to our eyes and fingers. Even as the blanket trembles in a corner. I get it, I tell my sister. I love the colors.

*

Tulips grow over the walls of the gynecologist office, black and white, all mouth and shadow. Hungry, as if they could swallow the stylized clay women with their clay bellies in the waiting room, sculptures of women and fruit, real women, too, the clay, the cherry antiseptic, the ammonia burgeoning past the petals and bellies. Even the smells look round.

I notice shadow more now, as if you float in darkness. When I look down into myself, as if swallowing, first my throat, my ribs, the tubes of my abdomen, I end in darkness, save a flutter, just below.

In the waiting room, the chairs, navy blue with cherry-colored legs and arms, are too ordinary. The women in them look like cartoons. 

*

The summers before we think of you, we go to the zoo in Toledo, three times a month, sometimes twice a week. We have nowhere else to go. He likes the strange birds, the hippos. I like the flowers and the giraffes, the baby monkeys eating orange rinds and quarter-sized chunks of bananas. Signs describe the adopted mother of the baby monkey, the one who could manage it after the first mother couldn't, the one who determines when high is too high, when to peel the baby off her neck and make him climb, when to ignore his alarmed yelps, when to hurry back. His eyes are black buttons. Everything is glass. We stand at the monkey cage the longest, sometimes sharing two scoops of strawberry, the smell of shit. Watching how she manages—

*

After the first appointment, down in the lab, a maze away, a handsome technician pulls six vials of blood. I tell him to use the butterfly needle, that I'm sorry about my veins. Try the left arm, I say. He's deft: the rubber strap, the alcohol rub, the tap. Slight pinch, he says, lying, slipping the needle into place. I look away as he snaps the tubes on, one after another, the blood like syrup.

Fluoresce bounces around the white cubicle. In the light and his blue scrubs, the technician seems blurry in the shine. I wonder if the rest of my blood notices the absence, if you, in there, feel the change. Closer to the source. What are the parts that I don't feel? When I was four, I cried when the oak trees lost their leaves. Maybe my parents said, don't worry. We only feel what we are supposed to feel. The technician writes my name on each label. So he knows whose blood is whose. Thanks, I say. The fluoresce follows me home.

*

We sit in a boat in my belly. Fig trees, pear trees, avocado trees, orange trees. The drape overhead. Fruit in the water. Lanterns. We rock without touching, with everything touching.

*

My husband's mother visits from California. She wears red sweaters and black sweat pants. Silver bangles. She uses a backpack instead of a handbag when she travels. She brings us a Chilean pineapple, four oranges, and two lemons. A carton of strawberries. Dental floss she bought with a coupon from CVS. A red pepper. A yellow pepper. My husband's father wants us to keep the fruit basket off the top of the refrigerator. He says we need a new thermostat, something digital, but then no, he says, you don't work regular hours, do you. When I say goodnight, I say that next time, there will be three of us. Oh, she says sadly as I leave the room. Everything is changing. Oh. Everything changing. Later, we leave the fruit basket where it is.

*

I will have to forget that you have been an orange, a bundle of blood.

*

Before the tree of my back threw shadows on the wall, before the waves, I wondered at all the words I don't know, all the names like a pyramid of oranges, disturbed, flooding the floor in a great spread, sweet and round and calling.  

*

In the parking lot, as I leave the doctor's office, I nearly step on a cluster of small dead mice, snouts and bottoms graying, curled in a pile against the asphalt, surrounded by oil spots. Eyelids pinched closed like the seam of a peach. The skin from the feet up to the knees is faded, bleeds them into the blacktop.

This is not an omen, I say to myself. It doesn't mean anything, I say again. I turn the radio all the way up in the car. I think about the small mice, bare in the parking lot. About how the mother must've crawled under a car for the ordeal. About her leaving. About the bodies coiled on the ground, still pink in the middle, cold pressing in from the edges. Perhaps she watched from beneath the nearby forsythia bush. I call my husband. Everything is fine, I tell him. There was no problem.  

*

For a long time, there are no nightmares, only blind, heavy sleep. In its depths, I wrap you and my belly in the angle of my elbow. It is only when my husband rushes from the other room to ask what's wrong do I realize that I'm screaming. I cannot tell him why. The sheet has twisted around my thighs and knees, and I cannot move.

*

I finally call the doctor. I wait until the burn under my arm makes me shift left-right, right-left when I try to sit, until the ache feels new and you are nowhere in it. I hate to call. I'm sure the nurse will tell me not to worry, and she does. She suggests rest and Tylenol.

She calls back. The doctor wants you to come in today as soon as possible, the message says. We need to do a sonogram. Blood work. She says something about a problem and centimeters and the cervix, but I am already in the car, already sorry. Swallow, swallow: I drive. In the elevator, I push my palms against the seams of my jeans, but I don't know what I hope to hold.     

*

In the dream, you are my youngest sister's age, with my sister's long, blonde ponytail. You play soccer with a boy I worked with, summers ago, at camp. I can't see your faces, the way they eclipse the sun. The green of the lawn and the light and the dream. I squint. I introduce you. I keep telling him your name. He doesn't seem to hear.

*

You push my belly and I hold the spot, the full handful, like a tomato, just before the skin splits.

*

This time, the technician in the lab is sick. She is a large woman, sturdy, with nasal congestion that matches her frame. Her scrubs are soiled. Coffee stains spread out over her front. Her nails are gray.

She speaks to me in code. Which? tying off my arm before she puts on her gloves. Red halos her eyes. Her curly hair fans out, twigs reaching around a corner for sun. I think about leaves, about shadows, about branches scrapping the windows of my bedroom in the morning, about the molting cardinal that never seems to move, even in the rain, even as the bush bends and scoops. Okay, she says, and turns away. The cardinal makes the bush look like it bleeds. I stand. Anything else? I ask. No, she says, turned toward the wall. I wash my hands in the lobby bathroom.

*

They say you weigh as much as a cauliflower now. A cauliflower, I am finally thinking, is not a person. Fuck them. I say fuck more now, to try to prove it. I say things like this in the daylight. I am a garden. I am not a garden. I am a fruit patch. I am not a fruit patch. You are a person and I am not a rain barrel or a row in some farmer's field of cauliflower. Fuck them. 

*

My husband reads to you while I take a warm shower in the evenings. Stuart Little. He shouts the words at us over the rushing water. My husband's grandpa loved Stuart Little. Especially the sailing bits. Grandpa drank a gin martini every evening at four and again at five and before someone else had to pour it, a lot more often than that.

Now back your foresail and give her a full, my husband yells over the shower, but you and I are too far away, lost inside our belly-sea, its red eyes turning, turning, absorbed in the threat of the next wave. And then, my husband shouts, everybody shook hands.

*

Saying my body is wrong. My body is our body. But it is not. In the mirror, there is the turn of my pelvis and a shadow. This container. We are nesting dolls.

*

My grandfather lost his leg in World War II. He never talked about the details, only about his friends, the other amputees, how they once drove around in a navy blue convertible and collided with another car. The tires exploded and the men threw their wooden limbs in the street and laughed and waited for the other driver to scream.

I do not know how it feels to loose something like a leg, to have it lost for all these years, to make peace with the loss.

My mother calls me to talk about his assisted living home, how he won't eat today. She tells me everything in life comes full circle. She describes the way she made him try to eat applesauce with his pills mixed in. How he can't tell her what happened yesterday. Where did it all go? she asks. I hold my belly and I think about the navy blue convertible, the tires too tight for impact. Baby, I sometimes say, even as I touch the prickles and thrusts that I know are your body, our body, are you in there?

*

I look for you in the fog inside my belly, through the willow trees, past feathered veins and long, dark caves, their stalactites dripping like citrus or blood about to clot.

I look for you as one might look for the beat of a drum.

*

My husband wants his dreams put down here, too. He dreams he can't get home. In one, he is a researcher in the Savannah, lost in the open. He circles the empty plain, only it is not empty. Frantic, is all he can tell me afterwards. In another, he dreams he circles the gates of an airport, crowds of passengers in winter coats pushing in as he runs to each gate, each plane already departed. He has to find a different terminal. When he wakes up, he says, desperate. In his dreams, there are stages of darkness, degrees that lead to despair. It is almost fun at first. I write it down and say nothing.  

*

I try to turn my painted eyes inward, my painted hands. Each matryoshka doll can't see what she contains, the layers behind her. All she can do is stare at the dark inside of her mother, at the smooth, curved places her mother has never seen. I think about your hair, the lilt of your forearm. Your eyebrows and cherry eyes. About the belly-sea under my ribs, about the women inside this body. I read somewhere that a set of nesting dolls must be made from one single block of wood. That the carver always begins with the smallest figure first, the one that cannot be taken apart. 

*

At class, everyone wears a nametag. My husband and I get pens with the hospital logo. We are supposed to take notes. We practice bathing our small doll, washing her eyelids, then her face and neck, the places behind her knees.

I feel silly holding her close, wrapped in towels, silly swaying back and forth. I never played with dolls. My sister has dozens, still arranged on shelves in her old room in my parents' house. Shelves of eyes and hair and hands held out.

The couple next to us won't stop talking, and we try to smirk as the others ask questions, raise their hands. Something about special soap. About sleeping. About fevers. We say nothing, like we watch the others from behind glass. As if we can watch it happen, and everyone else's dolls will start to breathe.

*

You ebb and push and hold still. I wait for your signals. I wait for you in the hang of very old trees, in the pad of squirrels on the roof, in gray, empty sidewalk squares. I wait for the signals. I wait for the signals. I wait and you are still. I am on the sofa. I am in the kitchen. I am in the bed. I am on the path, looking for the belly-sea. I wait. I wait and I want to count the wave. I hold still. I hold my breath, fists closed, belly still. Still.

*

The joints of my pelvis loosen, as if the rubber band that holds my body together has fallen around my ankles. My bones are liquid now. My house is liquid now. Who has taken the life vests, all the oars? Even the roads are streams, and I can't find a rock.

*

I have already filled out the insurance forms, listed the phone numbers, the medications, the father. I do not put down your name with my pen, even though I know it.

We tour, see the birthing room, the mats for blood at the end of the bed, the mirror in the closet. And look, she says, you can even adjust the thermostat. Here, she says, is where you turn down the lights. Won't that be nice? I nod. I am picturing the creature from the nursery, all bloody and purple and legs and arms and open mouth, and the father standing there, dressed in paper, hand braced into the wall. Oh yes, I say. Nice.

*

I go weightless, days and hours rushing against my cheeks and forehead. I dream disaster. I dream in feelings, in arms clutched around knots of blanket.

*

There are midnight runs to the hospital to test your movement, to check my pressure. The nurses say it happens to everyone.

The monitor might be a moon, the thumps of your heartbeat the wink of rotation. See that spike, one of them says. There. You move, they say, but I think it is too far away. I think you are building a fence with rocks. A bed has never felt so large. I feel like I must walk each day on the ridges between craters.  

*

My husband and I go for long walks in the heat of midnight, marching past the high school, circling blocks of eyeless houses and occasional streetlights. One house, at the halfway mark, has a perpetual gathering, a few people scattered in the garage on lawn chairs, grill still hot and smoking, even as the night hangs.

I feel the scope of my belly more acutely in the shadow of their patio light and their murmurs. We walk faster as we pass, my belly rolling, our flashlights mapping out space for our feet, drawing the path. We follow, as if tied to the light, and you roll, too, trapped in our dark, full boat. 

*

Years ago, my husband and I first went camping together near the glacial grooves in Ohio. The rock there is striped like a story, a story you think you already know but have to change to remember. We went and stood by the rocks, the stone the color of the chain link fence, and the record, there in the ground, of age. Where, I wanted to know, did the chunks of limestone, the bits gouged from the bedrock, end up. Where, I wanted to know, were the missing pieces now. Where, I might've asked, were you, even then.

*

There could be more dreams: the stone in the belly of the river. No, in the belly of my mother.

My mother gives birth to a polished stone. Pebbles fill the kitchen. She sends pebbles wrapped in tissue paper. I tell her I don't want any more packages. I have no more room.

*

The days are hot. The length of the days, of the pulse, becomes the length of my eyes. My body gasps. The length of the evitable, the constant fragility, days and eyes like pulled spindles of glass, like the walls of a swollen dam.

*

In this, I know I am singing. I cross waves. I see fields of women, whole forests grown from their shoulders, red flashing between branches. I hold sails. Gather leaves. Throw off my body. We sing in the water, sing through the water, sing to make the water. We sing a flood.

__

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