Karan Madhok
ultra sound beam
we needed more proof, more to place faith
in something we couldn't see, hear, or touch.
you were an abstract, like god. or love.
the big bang could make something exist
out of nothing. a culmination of
evolution from us to you. your mother's
queasiness could've been anything
at all: a flu, a hangover, a little
disturbance. we feared failure, fear of a seed
unfruited, of realising the dreams we
hadn't yet begun to have. the ultrasound,
however, brought vision to our skeptic
minds, and then it brought sound, a fast-paced
bravura more intoxicating than
religious chants invented by mankind;
womankind's finest invention, author
of another of her own self, a woman.
and when i saw there was life, humbled
by biology, it confirmed to me
that love isn’t just an impossible
abstract like bearded white men in the sky,
but our mortality on a printed
sonogram: precise and magnified
and alive.
Karan Madhok is an Indian writer and a graduate of the MFA program from American University. His short fiction, poetry, and translations have appeared or are forthcoming in Gargoyle, The Literary Review, The Moving Force Journal, ANMLY, F(r)iction, and more. He won American University's 2018 Myra Skralew Award for Best MFA Thesis (Prose) and is currently working on his first novel. He is the editor of the Indian arts journal The Chakkar.• Photo by the author