40 Weeks

A popular parenting website charts the growth of a fetus in weekly increments, declaring: “During pregnancy, your amazing baby grows from poppy seed to pumpkin.” Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach draws on the format of such updates to track her own pregnancy—but in decidedly more wide-ranging ways. The poems in this collection offer a forthright blend of everyday struggles (from a case of head lice to a partner’s health issues), but even as life remains relatively routine, intrauterine change is radical: “inside / her fingerprints / become / permanent.”

Pregnancy sparks essential questions. When one update announces that her fetus’s “face looks unquestionably / human,” Dasbach reflects on what looking human means in light of the inhumanities her Jewish forebears endured: “cut / from bellies, their ears / hung around men’s necks.”

The heirloom tomato of Week 19 sparks a riff on quantification, capitalism, and the uncertainties of prenatal testing, where:

[…] 99%
doesn’t mean anything is wrong + you refused
the genetic screening + you are too young
so it would have cost you 200
of her dime hearts […]

In “Week 39: Water: melon,” the speaker is in early labor when talk of oxytocin and hips is interrupted by thoughts of “polar ice caps” and “rising sea levels” that “beg / whales stop swallowing plastic.” As the barrier between self and world becomes more permeable, the speaker’s awareness of how the personal is inextricably bound up with the political is heightened.

But the developing child sparks plenty of tenderness. In “Week 10: Kumquat,” amid thoughts of a wildfire in Arizona, the speaker’s mind comes to rest on the “little orange, sweetening” inside of her. In “Week 31: Coconut,” fruit and body merge as “the coconut’s / husk, its tender white- / meat flesh, its milk,” evokes “the creamy clear / colostrum"—a mother’s first milk.

Dasbach captures how everyone feels they have a right to comment on pregnancy. “Looks like that baby / is about to fall         right out of you,” a woman calls. A shawarma seller insists on gifting lentil soup to the mother-to-be:

It’s not
for you, he says, pointing
to your belly
& you think
nothing ever is
or will be again.