By David Capps

I have been pregnant since 1987. I was living in Paris and finishing my dissertation, the calling card to enter academia. I was excited at first even though it had been unplanned and didn’t occur at the most opportune time. But after the nine months elapsed and I had gone to every doctor I could afford, had lost my partner to an affair, had had to continually replace my wardrobe, threw out the baby clothes and cradle, and become the subject of friendly ridicule after compassion had run dry, I was tired. I’ve been the butt of every possible pun involving storks and water breaking. Endless back aches. Useless therapy. There have been benefits: I rarely get sick. Prior to the pregnancy, I’d get the flu every year. Not anymore. It’s also still entertaining to share that knowing look with other moms-to-be, it’s a pure sort of happiness anticipating you will be the source and subject of unconditional love; except in my case that look is, for lack of a better term, a nice piece of acting. When I am not distracted with my own thoughts (I can’t describe how horrid of a mother I must appear to be when I fail to acknowledge them), sometimes they will stop and chat: ‘When are you due?’ and in my beneficence I will allow them to feel it kick. ‘It has a will of its own,’ I say, ‘it will come out when it wants’. But I’m no spring chicken, and when they notice the wrinkles on my face they assume that I’m a medical miracle, not a medical anomaly. Funny how people notice the baby bump first and the person second. And yes, I’ve had several romantic entanglements since 1987—the worst were with men who tried to impregnate me as a solution to my condition. Someone I truly loved once told me that every great idea is born of necessity, and he wasn’t talking about devising some stupid thing for sake of survival. Rather, Beethoven’s ‘es muss sein’ motif, the immoral necessity of the atomic bomb, the geographical location of the next Dalai Lama, that sort of thing. Logically, this meant that if an idea didn’t come off, or did but just as easily might not have, it wasn’t great. The thing is that all my ideas had seemed this way, unnecessary. So I began to collect them, to store them up within myself, my bodily oomphalos, witnessed how they lost some of their original subtlety by being reduced to a name, like Athena. At first they formed a hardened mass, which I carried like a benign fist, invisible to everyone but myself. But then something happened, they began to grow, felt like a life of their own for which no individual part was responsible. I’ve become a parent of sorts, to this thing I’d never unleash onto an already overpopulated world. I don’t bother looking myself over in the mirror anymore, and Paris these days is a shit hole. Maybe it will still happen one day. Maybe when I’m a corpse it will crawl out of me.

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David Capps is a philosophy professor and poet who lives in New Haven, CT. He is the author of four chapbooks: Poems from the First Voyage (The Nasiona Press, 2019), A Non-Grecian Non-Urn (Yavanika Press, 2019), Colossi (Kelsay Books, 2020), and Wheatfield with a Reaper (Akinoga Press, forthcoming). His latest work, On the Great Duration of Life, a riff on Seneca’s On the Shortness of Life, is available from Schism Neuronics.