Koi Pond

TW: Abortion

Look down and see your unborn baby
floating in the middle of the toilet
bowl—you see it spin slowly
like a lone koi fish, it’s soft pinked
flesh swirling in a murky pond
of blood clot-lily pads.

You were driving and pulled
over to throw up from the lightning
-strike explosion of sharp pain
in your uterus—you vomited into
a crumpled Walmart bag as the car
inched towards someone’s mailbox.

Feel the liquid warmth gush out of you,
life ejected, no—rejected from your
body, that life-giver. Peer closer at it,
that no-longer-life no larger than a
just-plucked raspberry squished into
some sort of spring jam.
You want to bury it.

Fill a small ring box with silk threads,
a few tears, a palmful of dust, and a
folded-up note of its name for the angels
to know and watch over—but no, this
maroon sea is its cushioned coffin, the
cold ceramic toilet seat its halo.

You flush, watch it swish around the bowl
in circles, life-blood swirling in water like
striped fins swimming away from you,
as if Allah didn’t say your unborn child
would drag you into heaven by its
umbilical cord, as if this angel baby—

Isra Cheema (she/her) is a poet from the heart of Oklahoma. She received a B.A. in English Education from the University of Central Oklahoma, and she is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative Writing at Texas State University. She writes about what it means to be a Muslim American Pakistani woman in today’s world. You can find her poems in The Bosphorus Review and Jaded Ibis Press.