2011 Issue - Santa Fe Community College

Now She’s Expecting
by Devon Miller-Duggan
Women are nothing but machines for producing children.
–– Napoleon Bonaparte
A Japanese researcher says
the ephemeral haze around her robes is rose and is, itself,
a finely woven robe the ladies of her class wore —
the guarnello –– to signify gravidity.
Perhaps their normal frocks’ amplitude
we so often read as mimicking fecundity
prevented friends’ eyes from knowing when they had achieved
that blessed state For centuries her face has graced
us with her enigma, smiling slightly on fancy candy tins
(oh, dear, another kind of amplitude…) and
greeting cards pregnant with irony and post-Warhol wit.
We’ve wondered what it is she knows.
We’ve treasured our uncertainty and her elusive gaze.
We’ve theorized she might be Leo self-portrayed.
We’ve made up codes and laid them over her like
nets to catch the butterflies of meaning.
Now Canadians have brought equipment in
to peer beyond the wisps and shades.
They have found an extra dress.
We construe from other paintings and
documents some scholar reads in
some archive in Italy, on a research trip supported by
some foundation, that gauzy overgowns for pregnant women ––
were all the rage. We speculate that she’d have been
so vogue-ish she’d have had her portrait painted by
the dandy from the backwater of Vinci,
wanting just that moment of her greatest possibility
enshrined. Perhaps, for these five hundred years,
we’ve loved her secret just so it could be
Santa Fe Literary Review 11