If that cross had a story, what would it be? / Copper wolves devouring my eggs, / or all my daughters raptured to nowhere?

Poetry by Meg Reynolds

I get an IUD wondering what end I’m bringing on. 
My uterus has its wine-dark vapors,
and a steady doctor to measure its length, 
custom place a rod of Asclepius inside, 
and make me barren as a plow. 
 
If that cross had a story, what would it be? 
Copper wolves devouring my eggs, 
or all my daughters raptured to nowhere? 
In the ache, the bloody aftermath of the 
examining table I wipe at with a paper blanket, 
 
she writes down 2031, so I’ll remember 
when the device will stop working, if the earth
is even around by then, she says, and I think 
on the future’s empty sockets, I’m sure I can 
find some roadside somebody to yank it out. 
 
She swears, in a pinch, you can do it yourself. 
Twelve years hence, I’ll be squatting 
on a desert stretch of highway, bent under 
a steel horizon to pull it from me like a thief 
pulls plumbing from under an abandoned house,
 
or I’ll leave it,
         frail thing, to be borne. 

Meg Reynolds is a poet, artist, and teacher living in Burlington, VT. Her work has appeared The Missing Slate, Mid-American Review, Fugue, Sixth Finch, The Offing, Inverted Syntax, and the anthology Monster Verse: Poems Human and Inhuman as well as The Book of Donuts and With You: Withdrawn Poems of the #Metoo Movement. She was recently selected as Fearsome Critter’s Top Hybrid Works Contributor. Her manuscript, Olly Olly Oxen Free, was a semi-finalist for the 2018 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize. Find her on Instagram: megreynolds_poet, Twitter: megreynolds_poetry, and Facebook: Meg Reynolds, as well as her website: https://www.megreynoldspoetry.com/.