seeds take root, budding out into forests, and then die. Names and Rivers. Shuri Kido, tr. Tomoyuki Endo and Forrest Gander.
Freshly flows an ancient fall
in Autumn time, so warm yet cold.
In a bite, the droplets mold
a dampened nascent wall.
Excess clings to roots around,
plumps the verdant, gnarled yoke.
Swollen, fertile, pistils drown
and then begin to soak.
Sticky, slimy, clammy
Life consumes the lilies
and feeds the wrigglies below.
Eggs are not produced after birth. When I was born, inside of me were all the eggs I would lose in my lifetime.1 For months, the egg that became me sat in the womb of my grandmother Marilyn, and the egg that became my mother Erin sat in the womb of my great-grandma Gwen, and the egg that became my grandmother Marilyn sat in a woman whose name has been forgotten. And so it will go if I have a daughter, until her daughter’s daughter forgets me too.
Knowing that they were there at the start, that my mother and I made these little eggs just as we made my fingers, haunts me. I don’t want a destiny. I don’t want a purpose. I don’t want potential. But it’s all I see—possibility, meandering paths, open windows. If tomorrow I decided to make a baby, I could. If I decided to quit my job and lose my visa, I could. If I decided to eat a rock, a crunchy, chalky one from the beach—down the hatch! it would go. The line between potential and possibility sits along the crown of my skull, and its itch interrogates and prods at me: What’s stopping you?
I think about the trillions of people who took every step of their mother’s life with her. I think about the latent potential of a single egg, one half of a whole, to become a part of the world around me. Among those trillions are people who have made stupid decisions; who have done the things the itch tells them to do; who have lived through to the wake of a life-altering mistake. I think about this. And sometimes, I hold the potential to ruin my life aloft before me and cradle it.
We are born with all of our primary ova—numbering around 400,000—which remain dormant until the body is sexually mature. From there, these ova either develop into mature egg cells and venture through the fallopian tubes, or fail and decay.