Donna Hilbert

• Dear Uterus,
• We’ve not been formally introduced.
• Oh, well.
• Who wants to meet a lover at a funeral?
• Old cozy blanket, fuzzy mitten, coffee pot
• simmering behind my stomach wall,
• out of sight,
• like my cousins in Oklahoma,
• like my pink angora sweater
• misshapen in a trunk.
• I’ve been happy knowing you’re there.
• Thank you for cooking up my children.
• I forgive you for letting one slip by.
• But lately you’ve become a nuisance —
• a dog that won’t quit licking,
• a too precocious child,
• a lingering house guest.
• Like a sailor on leave,
• you’re a creature of excess.
• I won’t spell it out.
• You know what you’ve been doing.
• There. I feel better. This clears the air.
• Must close, so long now, job well done.
• All things considered, it’s been fun.

Donna Hilbert’s latest poetry collection is The Green Season, World Parade Books, in second edition fall of 2011. Earlier books include Traveler in Paradise: New and Selected Poems, Transforming Matter, Deep Red, and Women Who Make Money and the Men Who Love Them (short stories). Hilbert appears in and her poetry is the text of the documentary Grief Becomes Me: A Love Story. Poems are forthcoming in La page blanche in French translation by Mariacristina Natalia Bertoli. “Dear John Letter to My Uterus” is from Traveler in Paradise: New and Selected Poems, published by Pearl Editions and is reprinted by permission. Author’s photo by Sandra Chandler.