Statistics

Poetry / Kerry Trautman 

 

:: Statistics ::

	
My blood created two daughters whose blood 
I fear for, now they are long dry from the fluid 

I floated them in. If statistics belong in poetry, 
let it be known that one in four pregnancies 

ends in miscarriage. None of mine did. But I would 
bleed a year away if it meant my girls could

keep whatever they want. An average US pregnancy 
will undergo 5.2 ultrasounds. A technician imaging 

my abdominal aorta once swore she could see 
straight through to the table, engrossed in how fully 

my pulsing vessel exposed itself. One in four women 
is sexually assaulted. I’ve never been. Have I ruined 

my daughters’ odds? Five percent of rapes in 
the US create pregnancy. Forty million 

MRIs are performed in the US each year. I want 
to see inside my daughters’ current and future bodies—

eliminate any anomalies, pain. One in eight women 
gets breast cancer. As an ultrasound technician 

hovered over a tumor in my left breast, I couldn’t seem
to convince the biopsy needle to find malignancy 

for the sake of my daughters’ breasts. My body is
old, but good could still be done toward its 

end. Like the music the nurse forgot to pipe into my 
leg MRI until I had only five minutes left inside. 

We all want to know how long until our luck runs 
out. There is resilience we don’t want to discover 

we have. My MRI shrieked and banged and 
robot-laser-clanged into my soft tissue, ending 

with five almost-lovely minutes of Miles Davis. 
My ultrasounds could not divulge future damage 

in me or in what I created. My MRI showed fluid 
ballooned around my joint. Lucky me—nothing broken.

From the writer

 

:: Account ::

Every­one talks about how much eas­i­er it gets to be a par­ent as your kids get old­er. And it is true, in a lot of ways. How­ev­er the chal­lenges they face become these very “adult” things, that we are still pow­er­less to solve for them. That sense of parental vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty nev­er changes. Our chil­dren are always these open wounds in us we need to pro­tect. In late 2023 and through ear­ly 2024, I faced some health issues—an ankle injury and a breast tumor (which thank­ful­ly turned out to be benign.) I also had my first colonoscopy in this time peri­od, which made it into an ear­li­er draft, but which I edit­ed out (you’re wel­come.) The med­ical pro­ce­dures I under­went had me think­ing about all of the vital infor­ma­tion we are able to dis­cov­er about our bod­ies, and yet how much we can nev­er know. We bear chil­dren, raise them, then release them into this world of vast unknowables.

Ker­ry Traut­man is a life­long Ohioan whose work has appeared in numer­ous jour­nals and antholo­gies. She has served as judge or work­shop leader for the North­west region of Ohio’s “Poet­ry Out Loud” com­pe­ti­tion annu­al­ly since 2016. Ker­ry is a the­ater-lover, and in 2024, her one-act play “Mass” received a staged read­ing as a win­ner of The Tole­do Reper­toire Theater’s “Tole­do Voic­es” com­pe­ti­tion. Her books are Things That Come in Box­es (King Craft Press 2012,) To Have Hoped (Fin­ish­ing Line Press 2015,) Arti­facts (Night­Bal­let Press 2017,) To be Non­cha­lant­ly Alive (Kel­say Books 2020,) Mar­i­lyn: Self-Por­trait, Oil on Can­vas (Gut­ter Snob Books 2022,) Unknow­able Things (Road­side Press 2022,) and Irreg­u­lars (Stan­chion Books 2023.) In 2015, Unknow­able Things (then titled Lean­ing Into it) was a final­ist for the Nation­al Fed­er­a­tion of State Poet­ry Soci­eties Stevens Award and a semi­fi­nal­ist for the Crab Orchard Series 1st Book Award.