Hip-softening Caribbean sounds
bangle out from the Real door,
locked as it is, should uninvited guests
barge in to legs cocked high with anxiety -
”you’ll get it this time, won’t you? ”

The tiny waiting room heaves
with heavy breathing, expectant seething
of women who want too much,
and one little girl waits for her mother
The music inside will relax a recipient
of some very bad news.

They diagnose life and death here.
Surely they could separate those
about to give life
from those who won’t live for much longer.

In the Pain Rooms it rains
in every molecule of air,
but there are happy moments there,
the one-in-a-thousand who leaves
with an invigorated womb
not a withered tomb, festered with endings.

Why do they play children’s television
in the waiting room of an infertility clinic?
Lactation leaflets sting an empty breast.
Someday I will return with my belly full of seed,
have this place cease to be
for me and my barren prairie.

Sonja Broderick

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/infertility-cancer-clinic/