This is how the ovaries shut down—
skyscraper lights burn out, one by one.
Inside the clock tower, the gears,
the chimes have stilled.
What was there all along
reveals itself—backsplash
of stars behind the tenements,
wind in the elevator shaft,
sound of water stirring
under the street.
It’s warm tonight. The last parade
is over. The last red ribbons
twist like snakes, and the air
smells like salt, like empty churches.
Now, a person can go
wherever she likes. Outside the city,
she can hear the fruit bats
lifting from clotheslines,
the field mice being born.
Now, she can make herself
a road for no one’s feet, say
goodnight to a thousand dark windows,
a thousand strangers who moved
behind the glass, who will always
be strangers now.
This is how a person wakes up,
how the witching hour begins. Make
no mistake. It’s early spring.
The river is rising.
This poem first appeared in The Indiana Review. Thanks to Zeina Hashem Beck for selecting it as the winner of the journal’s 2021 Poetry Prize.
“What Happens Next” is a poem I kept returning to, discovering something new with each additional reading. The poet skillfully uses both directness and indirectness to speak about the female body, as the reader is taken from ovaries to chimes, from parade to empty churches. I love how the first and last stanzas echo each other in their first lines, “This is how the ovaries shut down” and “This is how a person wakes up.” What might be perceived as an ending becomes an unexpected beginning in the body, a freedom, a celebration.
—Zeina Hashem Beck
Sarah Burke 