We must skim frog eggs from the pool
each day before cannonballs and floaty noodles.
That’s just the way it is living in the forest. The Cope’s gray
love the clear, still water, no matter the chemicals.

The youngest kid, who squealed at me
to skim, is now pouting that I’m killing baby frogs.
I explain these aren’t baby frogs. They are only
potential baby frogs, just like an acorn is not an oak tree,

but it has the potential to become an oak tree
if the conditions are right. Just like a ball of fetal cells
is not yet a child, but has the potential to become
a child if conditions are right. And I do the math

billions of women do. The two miscarriages had the potential
to become children who would now be 22 and 5, books ends
to the two that became. I had a Tuesday appointment to terminate
the first pregnancy but went to the hospital instead of The Who concert

the Saturday before in spontaneous abortion, my body freeing me
of having to make the decision. Responsibility traded
for a torturous unanaesthetized D&C in the ER
while med students stared up inside me.

I began to miscarry the other while hoeing a spring garden,
edging around plants that would feed the family come autumn.
My body kept the two that were planned,
and now I scoop and dash these frog eggs onto the grass

so those two children can pretend to be mermaids
and border control agents in the glittering turquoise water.
I’ve named the two only-ever-potential-children clumps of cells.
I’ve decided they were boys: Corbin Thomas and Elias Richard. 

I wonder where their souls ended up choosing to be born.
I’m ok with their redistribution, my acorns who never were
oak trees in this forest, my pregnancies that were never children
in my family, my not-quites whose absence has affected everything.