Extraordinary Sunshine Weaver

Thank you, Angela Kosta, for connecting me with these publishers. I’m delighted that they like the poem, “Ode to the Embryo that My T-Shaped Uterus Miscarried”, which is from my debut poetry collection, Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir (Experiments in Fiction, 2022).

The Raft of Dreams Literary Magazine

https://swapnervelasahityapatrika.blogspot.com (Search Barbara Leonhard)

Puspa Provat (Editore Md Ejaj Ahamed. India.)

https://puspaprovat.com/news/5447

Kobial24.net. (Editor Manik Chakraborty. Bangladesh.)

BARBARA LEONHARD

Ode to the Embryo that My T-Shaped Uterus Miscarried	

You left my broken womb
as the bloody remains of what
was never to come. I still feel you 
in the waves, the flow
of my sacral river - your tears?

Your fears I’ve abandoned you? 
No, Honey. No! I’ll never forget you. 
The t-shaped womb
couldn’t hold your brilliance.
Your tiny, beautiful self, 

washed away. Your light 
sparkles in each of my cells.
My core, your forever home. 
Your essence, my creative labor
in verse and art.

Everyone says, “Forget the dead.”
I can’t leave my baby 
screaming in her forever crib. 
Or my young miss alone
in harm’s way on grief’s edge. 

Though never delivered
into my arms, you shelter
in my wound of wanting. Each night, 
I press my scar against a pillow 
to swaddle you in your mother’s heat.

In dreams, we share the sacred skiff, 
and together, wind up and up
out of the wake 
of the wound 
into a newborn sky.