Two Poems by Elizabeth Tannen

Liz Phair, fifteen weeks

  On the same morning I learn
the fetus is developing folds that will become ears I also hear
that Liz Phair has a new album which makes me weepy because
special sentimentalities go along with being pregnant and with being
a teenager and hearing her name now converges these chapters, makes
me reminisce about being fifteen and in the back of Webster Hall,
swaying because I was so uncomfortable in my body and so taken
with excitement to be at my very first concert beside a very
pretty friend whose taste in music I let mold mine. Liz’s voice
has stayed the same but her heartache hasn’t aged well. She sounds
less fierce, more codependent. We were both supposed to stay
youthful forever. We were both supposed to remain as cool
as we felt in the 90s. I listen to the new album again to try
and like it better but it just makes me want to hear
Exile in Guyville, and I belt out the lyrics like the fetus
can hear, like it might forgive me and Liz for the imperfect
ways we’ve aged.

 

Riddle, six weeks

 Are you sure you want to switch
to pregnancy-tracking mode? my period-tracking app asks and a purple
circle with a peanut-shaped image of an embryo at the center stares up at me as I stand
in the white-walled laundry room of my apartment building basement
where I have come to hide from my partner who does not want
a pregnancy or a baby or a child and to retrieve a load of wet washing
and in the process I’ve hit what now appears to be a very significant button
whose pressing will activate an endless

stream of content warning women what

to eat and what not to eat and what skin products to avoid and which to use and
on any given day, whether your embryo is the size of a sesame seed or a lentil
and which exercises you should try and which never and whatever you do,
don’t stress out, it’s bad for the baby, but I don’t know that yet and in the moment
I’m not prepared because it’s Friday and I’m between Zoom meetings and
it’s been only minutes since I removed the pink wrapper on the First Response test
and peed into a glass jar that used to hold a pine-scented candle but today
holds my yellow urine which apparently contains the hormone that the test
says means positive which means that today my body is pregnant and yet
my body is also over thirty-five and has never, to my knowledge, carried a pregnancy
and there are too many emotions to process all of which will conflict directly with those
of my baby-hating partner and so it seems strange that the app whose job I thought
it was to simply track my menstrual cycle should be so bold as to ask whether
I’m sure about anything