Jill Michelle | Future | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

May 13, 2026

Jill Michelle

Future

n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured.

— Ambrose Bierce

Put the baby back in. Do not let her fall one February like a wishing star past that faulty chassis

your pelvic floor, into the ER doctor’s awaiting palms — nineteen weeks too soon, six

before they’ll call her viable, bother with the split-screen monitors of baby’s heartbeat

and yours, the incubators that you expected to find, those Plexiglass boats of hope, sailing

whisper-weight babies to life, missing from this ward. In January, stitch the cracked

cervix shut, repair the broken uterus, wait on hospital beds, your bed, the sofa for a

month, watching bedrest’s hook-slow seconds bleed into lemon-sour hours on wall clocks.

Try not to relive losing the baby before. Retract your a/c-shriveled feet from the theropod

grip of the OB’s swiveling stirrups. Wipe away worries, tears over the tweeded doctor’s

genetic report. Report to specialists weekly: shades of blood, how much. Notice your partner

bite nails to the quick. Breathe. Don’t panic at that first drop, tabasco-cap red, weaving a daisy

chain of dread through December, the spot last year’s GYN said was normal for some, probably

nothing. Look forward to that bewitching moment, the fuchsia feeling of her

flips, confetti explosions in your stomach. Think you’ve past the danger

point at fifteen weeks, that this time things will work

tell the family at Thanksgiving dinner, toast to the future.

The poem, “Future,” is part of a collection I’m currently composing, titled The She-Devil’s Dictionary, which responds to definitions from Ambrose Bierce’s 1906 work, The Devil’s Dictionary, originally published as The Cynic’s Word Book. When reading the definition of “Future,” the phrase, “That period of time in which […] our happiness is assured,” reminded me of how I felt at the Thanksgiving dinner in 2007 at which my spouse and I shared with our family that we were expecting again, after having lost a baby at 21 weeks into a pregnancy in February of that year. We had waited a month longer than we did the year before to tell anyone, worried that things might go wrong again, but felt safe at 15 weeks to share. Devastatingly, the same thing happened in February 2008, when my water broke again at 21 weeks, 6 weeks too soon for our child to be saved.