and somehow the fact that two men
wrote the Endgame screenplay confirms it,
because of course they’d give a man
with arrows the redemption arc,
the ability to touch his family again.
In a helicopter, Natasha and her sister
joke about their forced hysterectomies
and that’s how I know I’m watching a movie,
not from the explosions
or poor Russian accents
or metaphors for the Cold War,
but women laughing hundreds of feet in the air
about the choice of becoming
mothers taken from them.
Natasha says she has two families,
neither tied to her by blood, but by want.
When the Black Widows
and her pseudo family leave her,
a sea of women with barren uteruses rise,
plucked by men who wanted them to serve as
weapons, puppets. Always dressed in black,
grieving their wombs.
If widow is used for a woman who lost a spouse,
what’s the noun to describe losing a body part
that’s invisible to others?
When I leave the theater, the difference
between childless and childfree wades into my thoughts,
but then I remember even women
with no children are taught
to sacrifice their lives for everyone else.
Victoria Buitron is a writer and translator with an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Fairfield University. Her prose has been featured or is upcoming in Barren Magazine, Bending Genres, Lost Balloon, and other literary magazines.