The Night I Realize I Won't Be Able to Have Children

I am slow dancing in my living room

with my too-tall husband as the stereo

hums Mazzy Star’s “Fade Into You.”

The dark’s so bright it’s shining. It is cold.

I think frantically of gifts

I will never pass down to you,

all my never-to-be-born children:

Barbie dolls, wedding dress, my damaged DNA.

I will write, I know that already.

And I will always have time

to learn new things. Instead of wrestling

with toddlers, I will take up a language,

possibly exotic, perhaps Portuguese.

We two will never be a family, as

we’ve come to think of families

on television or in books:

four heads around a table,

three bodies walking through a park,

two children squabbling at a mother’s feet.

We will continue to be two.

And I will grow old without you,

my children, I will never worry over you

at night, your cough, your piercings, your prom dates.

Doctors have taken these little fears.

In the years to come, I will look back

on tonight, wonder how I took it all

so calmly, barely stopping my feet

from shuffling across the dim winter light.

The Princess and Her Swan Brothers

My father made a casket for each son

so I might inherit the kingdom

all I could do was pick nettles, nettles

shirts for my swan siblings

I lived in a cave and a king found me

I would not speak and he took me to a castle

but all I would do was weave nettles, nettles

I could not speak a word and then

my brothers the swans visit me at night

weep tears on blistered fingers.

If I speak they will be birds forever

the king wanted me for his bride

I could not speak

his people tried to burn me

my hands full of nettles and feathers

I wept but could not speak

The flames startle upwards

my brothers your shirts made of nettles, here

in the sky seven swans circled the village crying

and the swans flew out of the sky human

I opened my mouth to speak

the sound like air rushing through white feathers

Jeanine Hall Gailey is a Seattle-area writer whose first book of poetry, Becoming the Villainess, was published in the spring of 2006 by Steel Toe Books. Poems from the book have appeared multiple times on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac and Verse Daily, and two appeared in the 2007 The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. She was awarded the Washington State Artist Trust GAP Grant in 2007 and recently joined the core faculty of the Young Artists Program at Centrum. She has published poems in journals like The Iowa Review, The Columbia Poetry Review, The Evansville Review, and Rattle. She has reviewed books of poetry for The American Book Review, Calyx, and The Cincinnati Review, among others. She has an M.A. in English from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA in Creative Writing from Pacific University. She volunteers as an editorial consultant for Crab Creek Review.