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.