Heat Wave
The summer my oldest daughter is born is a blaze,
roaring up from the Sahara to blanket all of Europe.
Roads buckle from the boil. Bascule bridges lift and swell,
stuck half-risen and unable to fit back in place.
The news reports rising hospitalizations, even death–
the danger of what our bodies can’t withstand.
Here, homes are built to hold against the withering
Dutch winters, and so inside, too, the temperature rises,
taunting the little ember curled in my womb, days past due.
We spend hours biking the city, seeking any relief
in air conditioned department stores, cinemas,
bright bars in the lobbies of chain hotels.
At night, we open the windows and doors. I lie heavy
on the floor, my body papered in soaking towels,
ice pack on my forehead. I’ve lost track of how long
the heat has refused to give, how long my daughter
has refused to come. My husband refreezes the melted ice
pack, wets the now-warm towels again.
Some mornings or evenings, we reach
for each other, ignoring the slick of sweat, fumbling
around the barrier of my pregnant belly,
finding pleasure in each other as the gulls scream
outside and the whole of the continent waits with us
for something to break.
Emerging
Months before she came, I toed the coastline
of Cyprus and felt her lift in the sea of my belly,
a promise to appear from foam and water. In the deep
of my labor tears salted my skin, my body a breaking shell,
and she slipped quietly into being, the pulsing cord
unfurling beneath me, still binding us. As if she knew
who I was, she looked up. To the midwife, I said, she sees me.
And my midwife said, yes. Said, take her. Or said, turn,
but I was already reaching through the slick
of blood and water. I believed–believe–her touched
by Aphrodite whose rocky island I hiked, whose ruins
I traced my hand along, whose water I waded into,
carrying her like a pearl. I lift the small stone of her
body to my chest, saying she is coming, she is here.
Anna Sandy Elrod earned a PhD in poetry from Georgia State University and currently
teaches in the English department at Kennesaw State University. She is an editor and co-founder of joint projects Birdcoat Quarterly and Ghost Peach Press, and her own work can be found in the Threepenny Review, North American Review, the Offing, the Shore, FUGUE, and other journals. She has successfully created two miniature versions of herself. She lives with her husband and two small daughters with really big hair.
