Waiting Room and Other Poems

by Chelsea Fraser

WAITING ROOM

It smells like old

And new.

Old building

New carpet.

A clash of sense

Where I fear I may smell

Of old habits

And new flaws—

Old pains building

New halls in my life.

Clashing senseless

Into me where I sit

Seeking restoration.

OCTOBER

October breezes bear the colors in

And chill the pumpkins lying in their beds.

They turn the skies a dusky shade of pink

Or shatter clouds with blue that never ends.

October bids the winter sky to come

And Cassiopeia receives her crown

While other stars, in wonder, cast their glow

Through timeless depths to grace our humble homes.

October bears her piles of colored leaves

Into their blazoned glory on the wind,

And consecrates their winding wend like sheaves

To feed the earth in hibernation’s den.

October clears the way in brilliant bursts

For winter’s sleep and rest in all the earth.

MATRESCENCE

I have just learned of matrescence: the coming of age into motherhood, the rite of passage that forever changes a

woman into a mother. Mine began in 2014, and like so many rites of passage in my life, this one is marked with

incompetence.

Made to carry life.

From my first breaths

I held the fullness of my womb,

Held the fullness of potential

From infancy.

And time and again,

My incompetence has been proclaimed:

Disproportionately to potential,

And often false.

But in this,

This birthright of a woman,

Such a proclamation held true.

It threatened the potential of my womb

To carry the life it made.

It broke, threatening burglary,

My cervical lock,

Rendering me incompetent

To carry a child on my own—

Not even the one that I carried.

And the competencies of others

Bore me up,

Carried my fullness and potential

To a surgical suite,

Watched a little head return to invisibility

Behind an artificial lock,

Circling his exit 18 weeks more

Until the threat was gone.

And the known incompetence

Was safer than before.

Shielding my womb’s fullness—

And its potential—

Three times over.

Allowing my womb to bear breath

In invisibility (and incompetence)

And in fullness

To carry life.

CHELSEA FRASER

Chelsea Fraser is a wife, mother, poet, musician, and arts minister. She believes that the lived experience is art, that creation is art, and that we were made to participate in making beauty. Chelsea seeks to use the arts to build disciples of Jesus, and her work pays attention to the natural world that God has made, seeking to connect it to human moments.

She holds a BA in English Literature and an MA in Organizational Communication and has been published in Ekstasis Magazine.

.