To the Purple Dye Inserted
into My Uterus
into My Uterus
Oh loveliness, tell me what you see –
which horizon hues open to you. What
I didn’t know I didn’t need to know
until now. Are my fallopian tubes
roller coaster looped or sidewalk slick?
Do you detect dangers there? I only
know what I’ve been told. Here
on my crackling paper bed, I am soothed
by our meeting through a screen. Like you,
I looked for home somewhere. Let’s see
each other eye to dye. Find the caves,
the linings, seek that uncharted I never
explored in person. How lucky are you
to have a place to go. Send forth, tinsel-light
the highways, the potential paths. Announce,
this way, this way. We are all so blind.
The hollows swallow you. You thread through
like cracks in wood grain. Spiraling my lining alive.
I envy your mobility. Bloom my insides.
What doesn’t yet grow needs rich soil.
Uncloak what has yet to seed.
Jen Siraganian
Jen Siraganian is an Armenian-American writer, educator, and former Poet Laureate of Los Gatos, California. Her debut book, Everything Has Been Moved, Even the Dead, which won the 2026 Perugia Press Prize and will be released in September 2026, was a finalist for the Tupelo Press Dorset Prize and The Journal’s Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize, as well as a semi-finalist for Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, Philip Levine Prize for Poetry, and Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. Her poems have won the New Ohio Review Poetry Prize and have appeared in AGNI, Best New Poets 2015 and 2025, Cincinnati Review, Electric Literature, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, and The Rumpus. A former managing director of Litquake: San Francisco’s Literary Festival, she has received funding from the Money for Women / Barbara Deming Memorial Fund and is a current Lucas Artist Fellow at the Montalvo Arts Center.