eggs

Zelda Boden

The frog was pregnant.
Though I opened its stomach expecting to find a little froggy
growing inside with a small umbilical cord and
the beginnings of fingernails and a heartbeat, there was none,
just a collection of eggs that swelled against its womb.

When I was little,
we would go up to our necks in the lake water
 and run our hands against the dock and reeds.
We would look for snail eggs, pick them off with our fingers,
and place them in the water where their shells
would start to dissolve.

When a woman carries her daughter; three generations are connected.
My grandmother survived the Nazis and Russians.
In her small Polish village at night, if it got cold enough,
she would bring horses and chickens
inside her dirt-floored home. It had two floors.
I know this because of my favorite story.
Russians followed her home, she ran to the second floor,
kicking one of the soldiers down the stairs, killing him.
She leapt from a window followed by men
carrying their guns and shooting at her feet.
She dove into a pond, staying underwater as
bullets drowned around her.
When they stopped, she lifted her head out of the water.
On her head, a lily pad crown
with a frog on it that jumped away
as she surveyed the calm and started walking home.
I didn’t know what war meant then.
I wanted a lily pad crown, too.

He had apparently been counting my birth control for months.
I’ve switched methods.
6 years later, I still think about what our child would have looked like.
Was it my fate to be a rape survivor?
Was it written inside my genetic code?

Before birth, I was given all the eggs
I will have for life.
Sometimes I can feel them.