"I wake at dawn to glimpse my barren chest and speak to the children I won’t birth." by Spencer Williams

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July 29, 2024 
 

I wake at dawn to glimpse my barren chest and speak to the children I won’t birth.

Spencer Williams

My two delicate hums. 

My pair of soft assemblies.

 

My want is a canary rattling the morning’s thin frame, 

the steady breath of droplets following months of bad weather, 

two small plates dismembered on the hardwood. 


Despite evidence, I think love should indent the self in some way. 

My breasts, the swollen lunch of mosquitos. 
 

Sometimes, 


the crave is too much for one body. 

I take my woman pills with an apathetic edge because I’m brutally aware 

of what they won’t fix. 
 

My imagined daughter. My imagined son. 

Please forgive my circumstance. 

Copyright © 2024 by Spencer Williams. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 29, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets. 

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“I wrote this poem after meeting my friend’s beautiful and perfect baby for the first time. Later that evening, I got a little (a lot) wine-drunk at a bar and started rambling about how badly I wanted kids of my own someday. While my companion was in the bathroom, I messily scrawled the third stanza of this poem on a bar napkin and later found it crumpled in my pocket while doing laundry days later. I decided to finish the poem sober!”
—Spencer Williams

Spencer Williams

Spencer Williams is a Mexican trans poet from Chula Vista, California. She is the author of TRANZ (Four Way Books, 2024).

TRANZ

TRANZ
(Four Way Books, 2024)

“Dysphoria” by Oliver Baez Bendorf
read more
“Things Haunt” by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
read more

Thanks to torrin a. greathouse, author of DEED (Wesleyan University Press, 2024), who curated Poem-a-Day for this month’s weekdays. Read or listen to a Q&A about greathouse’s curatorial approach and find out more about our Guest Editors for the year.
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