Pushcart 2026 L: Keya Mitra, “Almost Born” (non-fiction) from Missouri Review 01/17/2025

Serial miscarriers, especially those over forty, become accustomed to grieving in isolation. Two or three losses elicit sympathy and compassion. After the first, friends and therapists suggest that you plant a tree or have a ceremony to commemorate the embryo you lost. After the third, no one mentions trees or ceremonies. You are met by uncomfortable silences, shifting eye contact. The fact that you’re still trying feels illicit, shameful, masochistic. …. After the first few losses, your OB-GYN says that you won’t need office visits for your miscarriages. Instead, you communicate via MyChart and go in for lab draws, forty-eight hours apart, to make sure your hCG levels are dropping. It’s not personal, you know. It’s just that the doctors have nothing left to offer you. Once in a great while, I come across a non-fiction piece that’s so intense, so personally revealing, I don’t want to write about it at all, as if just relaying its content is a kind of desecration of a sacred act. I…