By Elisabeth Farrell

Flurry of snow, marvelous and blinding.
Through the window I watch it go down.
Thirty-foot pine limb on the ground,
the hundred-year-old apple tree broken
beneath its scented branches.

Men come to clean things up.
Chainsaws and hard hats and pickup trucks.
Apple trunk, its center dark and hollow,
sliced into chunks, roots dug up
and fed through the chipper.

I watch, just minutes from learning
inside me there is no baby, only a sac:
black and empty on the ultrasound screen;
hours from laying my body flat on a steel bed,
legs spread, womb sucked clean.