Heather Lanier | Erasing the Book of Pregnancy

Erasing the Book of Pregnancy. Poems by Heather Lanier, selected by Ron Mohring as Number 3 in Volume 6 of our Editor’s Series.

Release date:  January 21, 2025 [100 copies]
ISBN: 978-1-960693-22-8
37 pages
$12.00

Heather Lanier is the author of the memoir, Raising a Rare Girl (Penguin 2020), a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice, along with two award-winning poetry chapbooks. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, TIME, The Wall Street Journal, McSweeney’s, The Sun, and elsewhere. Her full-length poetry collection is Psalms of Unknowing (Monkfish Publishing, 2023). She works as an assistant professor of creative writing at Rowan University.

Sperm

Don’t let their tadpole shapes
fool you. They lack a heart,
a stomach, a set of eyes.
They’re luggage
and propulsion, a sack of genes
and the motor to deliver.
They hunt for their half-self,
some queen cupped
by the sponge-hands of biology,
all atoms around her
singing F notes of aw
to her rotund, planetary self.

When he comes, mouth open,
toes wiggling, he’s held
between a million pasts—
cavemen coaxing fire,
a shy bird-watching grandfather—
and a million futures
all swimming toward becoming.
The Marine Corps-worthy
obstacles are many: ten thousand
lengths of their bodies,
the skee-ball score of the cervix,
two tubes a la Frost’s
two roads and only one will do.

What if the wrong one reaches?
My mind trains toward catastrophe.
The Earth is the perfect distance
from the perfect-sized star
due to what? Luck?
Or that other, chipper phrase
typed into the alternate book
I’m meant to hold: Happens
for a reason? Please make it so:
that some grand hand
orchestrates each life
like a symphony we can’t hear
as anything other than clanging
because we’re too far or too close.

[ Thanks to The Chattahoochee Review for first publishing this poem ]