You Are Now Entering Antarctica
When the glacier breaks, we’re sitting down to eat
dinner. A large piece of ice beginning the slow move
South puts me on edge, evolutionarily speaking.
My skin, already white, feels like it’s shimmering
like the mopey vampire in the Twilight teen flicks
because I am outside my Goldilocks zone.
I know what’s happening inside me is not right
but it is a force of nature. Rising to stand, cold sinks
but no one notices; a pregnant woman shuffling to the lav
as common as the un-dead in fiction. In fact, my family
continue eating while I watch blood pool around my feet
in the rental apartment. I call for help the way abused
ice caps do, low key, trying not to alarm my middle
kid. Unsurprisingly, I am ignored. I call again,
emphasise; need inflates, is awkward to navigate
through a thick wood door. My placenta is not the Titanic
though it is broken in half and there’s no room for Jack;
not Frozen, not like the snow man, you can’t put the head
back on. Technically this is an end, but it is not The End,
although I can’t see a future at this point. I carry my hospital bag.
Prepare for a car then a wheelchair ride through a cold corridor.
Rachel J Fenton is the author of Beerstorming with Charlotte Bronte in New York (Ethel Press). Shortlisted for The Royal Society of New Zealand Manhire Prize for Science Writing, the Mslexia Poetry Pamphlet Competition, The Emma Press Poetry Pamphlet Prize, The Disquiet Prize for Literature, runner-up in the Ambit Summer Competition, and others, her poems have appeared in Ink, Sweat & Tears, English, Magma, The Rialto, Overland and Landfall. Originally from Yorkshire, she lives in Te Waipounamu, Aotearoa, where she is Curator of Janet Frame House.