“From the moment I was pregnant, I didn’t just feel different. I was different. I am different.
On a cellular level. I would never be singular again.” – Lucy Jones, Matrescence
At our thirty-week appointment, the doctor:
your heart beats are intertwined;
I cannot tell them apart. My bones
knew it was true, and I orbited in the abyss,
between statistics and fear.
Your gravitational pull grew inside me.
When a needle entered your skin, I felt
the prick. When the nurse first bathed you,
my own screams wanted to echo
down the hallways. Your cries burrowed
into my body, and it called you home.
Everything could hurt you: the ceiling fan
could dislodge and crash, the cabinets
could catapult from their post, the boiling
soup could spit and scald. I whispered
be careful as I released you to the gentlest
of hands. After a year I began to feel
we were, in fact, separate people.
All this cleaving we’ve done to cleave away,
the me that is you and the you that is me.
–
Jodi Andrews authored Skin Reverberations (Pasque Press, 2022) and The Shadow of Death (Finishing Line Press, 2018), and she has had work published in Anomaly Literary Journal, Halfway Down the Stairs, Mockingheart Review, Atlas and Alice, and others. She holds an MA in English and teaches writing.
© 2026, Jodi Andrews
Halfway Down the Stairs 