Koi Pond Isra Cheema This poem was first published in Ghost City PressTW: AbortionLook down and see your unborn baby floating in the middle of the toilet bowl—you see it spin slowly like a lone koi fish, it’s soft pinked flesh swirling in a murky pond of blood clot-lily pads. You were driving and pulled over to throw up from the lightning-strike explosion of sharp pain in your uterus—you vomited into a crumpled Walmart bag as the car inched towards someone’s mailbox. Feel the liquid warmth gush out of you, life ejected, no—rejected from your body, that life-giver. Peer closer at it, that no-longer-life no larger than a just-plucked raspberry squished intosome sort of spring jam.You want to bury it. Fill a small ring box with silk threads, a few tears, a palmful of dust, and a folded-up note of its name for the angels to know and watch over—but no, this maroon sea is its cushioned coffin, the cold ceramic toilet seat its halo. You flush, watch it swish around the bowl in circles, life-blood swirling in water like striped fins swimming away from you,as if Allah didn’t say your unborn child would drag you into heaven by its umbilical cord, as if this angel baby—

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