Occasionally, I think about the fetus in my jewelry box,
often when I fill my belly with sin-
ful treats while getting stoned in the half bath
of the apartment I share with an unwed man.
I call him Stanley (the fetus, not my boyfriend)
after the secular cut-out paper child I delivered
to cross-country loved ones in elementary
school, theologized and rubberized
for God’s eyes in high school.
The summer before I left home, he endured
as a squatter in my sock drawer, a soon-to-be table
topic I’d bring with me on my last first date, semester abroad
in Rome, an assortment of apartments, a strange relic
of my past and conceivably future bodies
I was too afraid to forget.
These days, I hide away his featureless form between fish
hooks, studs, and crawlers, beady chokers from college
when I was allowed collarbones, shoulders, and Sundays
to myself, embarrassed to have kept him all these years just in case
God was watching.
Sometimes I forget he is
there, rediscover him while searching
for Twilight dangles, wring Fetus Stanley from his bed of jewels
and squeeze him like a stress ball until I remember
his latex siblings in boxes in my teacher’s garage.
A great deal, she said while delegating their imagined lives
to us unworldly almost-women, prizes
for stomaching a semester of birthing
videos and Biblical reckonings on our reproductive parts,
packaged nicely in gift bags, lying
on laminated prayer cards, rosaries
borne with the holiest of intentions
around their necks.