Here’s what really happened—
there was no miscarriage.
Only a packet of blood that never ceased.
I believed I was finally being granted
my wish to be pulled from this Earth.
Almost three hundred days of wanting to die,
passively suicidal by fucking any willing visitor
to my personal space and never eating
more than a responsible disordered eater should—
and here was my body, finally granting permission.
How fitting it would happen
via my vagina, my womb, hell bent
on winning the argument between
my growing up and its growing out.
It’s rare to find someone bleeding as long as I
did—forty days straight until I finally saw a
doctor—but no instrument could stop me from
accepting my cause of death: menstruation. My
supposed baby daddy introduced me
to the man I thought I’d marry—and I still
believed I wouldn’t survive the vows.
Nineteen, depressed, Black, woman—
a neat statistic and stereotype.
Today, a nurse called it a miscarriage, ten years later,
and I just want her to remove my uterus.
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