Death – Clan Witch & Word Refinery

Expectant Miscarriage: Waiting for Averey

Personal blog post

My first was in 2004, a spontaneous natural miscarriage.

My second was in 2013, a missed miscarriage that required medical management.

My subsequent pregnancy ended with extreme preterm natural birth in 2014.

Number four was in 2016, another preterm birth, delivered by emergency caesarean.

2022, another missed miscarriage. I’m currently in the limbo phase of knowing my baby is dead inside my womb. I am waiting for contractions and birth, referred to medically as ‘expectant miscarriage’.

Does that make you uncomfortable? Me using the term ‘birth’ instead of ‘miscarriage’? Does it jar to read ‘contractions’ instead of ‘cramp’?

Some pregnancy and loss terminology has raised personal discomfort since my first. Since I was able to directly relate through lived experience what these words mean, and while much has changed in the professional medical approach to supporting parents through these situations, there are still these underplayed words that almost mute and downplay the experience that a body and mind go through with pregnancy loss (the death of a baby). From my personal experience (and every one is different), ‘mild to severe cramping’ (when the physical process takes hold) is not cramp; these are contractions. Miscarriage is labour. Miscarriage is birth. Miscarriage is still birth. Except, the pain is extended beyond the physical.

Even now, in 2022, it feels like we’re not supposed to talk about these things. Not in any depth anyway. It’s all hushed and quietly ushered into another room. Door closed. Keep it for a support group (at most). I use the term ‘talk’ loosely, as I’m not particularly a talker. I process better quietly, introspectively, creatively and practically than with my mouth or too much external involvement.

A couple of weeks ago, I witnessed my baby actively bouncing around inside my uterus. The flutter of his tiny heartbeat, a symphony of life in black and white. This week, he lay still. There was no flutter, no activity, no life. Cradled inside my uterus, my baby is dead. Baby? Does that make you uncomfortable? Would foetus be better? After all, that’s just a bundle of cells. What about ‘pregnancy tissue’ or ‘products of conception’? Then we can forget about the fully formed central nervous system, circulatory systems, the (recently) rapidly growing brain, organs, heart… it’s just a foetus…

No. He’s my baby. And I can’t stand the disrespect of him being regarded as anything else. My daughters have given him his name, Averey. 🖤

https://clanwitch.com/2022/08/03/one-for-sorrow/

One for Sorrow

I’ve been seeing them for months in fours

Fanned feathers

Celestial blues, flanked with obsidian rainbows—

Four for a boy.

Three days ago,

Three didn’t show.

One flew solo—

One for sorrow.

Yesterday and today, the same—

One for sorrow.

Another silent death inside the chalice of life.

Mother of death—another passes beatless.

At least he will, soon.

It could be hours, days, weeks away.

One for sorrow.

He has no clock,

Only mine ticks on.

Until then, I wait.

Holding the silence within—

The growing void

Of his deathbed.

His roof collapsing from

The haematoma down.

I select a tree, a burial site,

A square I knitted nine years ago,

His teddy.

I consider the name that will be whispered when he slips from my body into my palms,

And my eyes drink his flesh in for the first and final time.

One for Sorrow.

I’m birthing death—

Not for the first time.

Figment

Pressing, softly through the cracks
Fragments of consciousness
Piston hissing speckled the dead-night

Moving electricity aside
She slips in like butter
Melting and reforming to what I once knew

She was melancholy like my heart
Sullen of soul
My scion mirror

The tunnel formed
Attuning the station 
Between pre and post mortem
A hollow in this verse
A meeting place

We spoke about mortality
Not with words
It was all there, though
Moths fluttering in the air
It’s been a while…

Since we shared space
Since we shared time
She keeps reminding me, though
Those are figments...
 
Of faux comfort
Fool’s restraints
Flimsy, weak cortex
It’s not everything
Not even close

The cat’s body is in the next room
Upon the pink bedspread
His marbled fur of coppers and black
Still as the void
I can look if I want, she tells me
He won’t stir yet
But I can’t leave
Paralysed in the serenity
Permeating from her form

There’s so much more to that cat

The sun seeps in
Glimmers strain against the sides 
Dagger sharp
Fragments tear the space asunder

I’m here again…
She’s gone.

© Natasha Sinclair

One Last Time

Biding time until reaper's weepers dispersed
The mourning departed to spread grief song

I linger until silence befell cemetery gates
Beyond the ceremonial bound

In observance
Solitary silence
Spiritual widow
I’ve waited…

Making way across the damp green
Souls stick in the mud sinking
Making my way to you
One last time

Love out of sight
Residing now on opposing dimensions
Held in the brevity of penumbra
Lovestruck in shadow
Your dark spell, loves curse

By the mound afore you
I stare into your pit
Imagining the pits of your eyes behind the box
Pondering the transparency of your boxes of fabrication
Heart-shaped carpentry, weak to these sorrowful eyes

My love on a fine line
Kneeling with my hands in your mud bed
I climb into your grave
Lay atop of your box poured with flowers you hate

Deep in the hole upon my love’s burial bed
Breathing in the fumes of your death
Feeling deaths whispers swarm my head

Love eternally buried in me
Beyond the finite blood and bone
Can you feel the heat penetrate your cold corpse?
I lie in your pit
Widow death shroud 
On top of my love…

One last time


© Natasha Sinclair

FREE HORROR

Newly released for the death of 2020 – The Sirens Call eZine is out now! Celebrating a world of horror and dark fiction from around the globe, Sirens Call Publications have put out issue 52 containing 130 pieces of Horror and Dark Fiction. All honouring the theme of death. I am chuffed to have one of my own stories Snake appear in this issue. Snake first appeared in Concoction: A mini Anthology of shorts which is still available in print and ebook from Amazon worldwide. To get your hands on The Sirens Call eZine – where you can read online or download your copy FREE – head to their site:

RELEASE: The Sirens Call eZine Winter 2020 Edition – Issue 52 | FREE Online #Horror and #DarkFic #eZine #magazine @Sirens_Call | The Sirens Song (wordpress.com)

Snake, first printed here: Concoction Anthologies (2 books) Kindle Edition (amazon.com)

No Good Grief

Gnashing and gnawing at my innards
Viscera shredded; trauma tombs embedded
Stitch in bells, weigh down the nauseating flapping
Jangle a euphonious jingle
Steady placement of chinked shield
Conceal agonies.
  
U-bend blocked
There my guilt brims
Shame for wishing away rapid cell division
Liquor and voluntary scalding
Natures way away
Life folding poured out
Out of Order; terror of disorder
  
For two, a freshly dug hole
The morning after
Mourning follows
Nipping at heals with the snow
A hollow in another garden
There, a piece of my heart lays
A depression for my first’s succession
  
She wants to see my torment on display
To harvest in morbid grief games
Pretend she’s just the same
Catfish loss-mother
Conspiring tiring 
Yearning to reap from the suffering leaks of my soul
Observe my lamentations trapped in a fishbowl
To don a cape, be in control
Prodding my wounds, infecting
  
Imitation empath storing stories
Catalogued, indexed, held hostage
Latching of grief vampires
Sucking ephemeral life’s marrow
Chipping stones off my bones
  
An archaeologist scraping the shovel
No delicate brushing of bristles
Attention desperation
Desecrating my pain 
Self-appointed steward on my cradle’s grave.

Reluctant Reaper

Rolling rumbling tumbling of the muscle
Steadfast working out the dead

Waiting through waves
Expulsion from womb to world; inner-outer dimension switch

Existence given visibility
Life unviable; dead tangible

The ticking clock veiled agony; pulse-quickening within the neck
Swimming through minutes in viscous shards; stark, exposed in wait

A sudden burst to cemetery-serene-silence
Shock of expectations met, tension swells and pops within the void

Her body expelled, revealed
Limp, still, disturbingly perfect

Few eyes lay upon her — none with such desperate thirst as the child-loss-mother
Tattooing details to memory
Cerebral and uterine imprints
Memories outlived instantaneously

Tiny fingers, toes, torso, fused eyes, jaw, ears…
All except the beating of the heart
Virgin lungs void of air in this, her death hours stare

My pathetic heart beats so hard it chokes the throat
The muscle has pried itself from within its cage, making way up to swell in the gullet

Don’t take her away…
Emotion sickness swells drowning from the inside
Even dead, she’s still the baby; even dead, she’s my baby, still

Must give her honour of life…somehow
Gemini mother; creator, reluctant reaper

Now her death feeds life
Entangled in root tendrils within the earth
Forever reaching within and upward

The true heart of something that doesn’t have to beat
Her cycles visibly viable

Bleary eyes can’t always see their praise of stars
Despair wracked the heart for a time

Peace isn’t only for the dead…

She sways in the wind now; dancing grace
Energy shared, scattered through leaves and bellies of beasts
She worms and she soars through them

Not the life imagined; energy shifted, realigned
Heart-wrenching, gut-punching beautiful

Death Born Still — Lives

Written on reflection during ‘The Wave of Light’ 15th October 2020.

Frozen Slack Still

A daughter held him, frozen.
Imitation of new dead still; only air flowing through functioning lungs.
Numb dumb in thought, inaction.
Painfilled love for this new grieving orphan.
The fallen favourite of a Mothers beloved brood.
There would be none of us had she not been; none of his Fatherhood.
A tangled barbed root from which we each came.
Some blessing amongst much insane.
Now there she lay, dead in a bed; frozen slack still.
An empty shell; once wishing well.
Dead in a bed, not even her own.
Eyes pouring in great damming floods; others uncomfortably dry as desert bone.
Through strangers’ hands she passes, between arctic fridges of steel.
Upon the final spin of the great Mothers wheel; scions on the side-lines awaiting the final reveal.
Embalmed, freshly robed in white; encased as a doll in her satin lined box.
A gift to the soil never to spoil.

© Natasha Sinclair