for Claudia at 5 hours old There were two kinds of mornings the day you were born. We had the other. We whispered about you in bedrooms and then we talked in kitchens. We did laundry, folded sheets thinking about your hands, how they would be so small. We paired sock with sock and then…
I like walking the house at night, my husband asleep beside my absent shape. I would use the word secret, but it makes him restless, as though he were a child and I used the word tomorrow; as though he were dying and I used the word tomorrow. I walk the house I built before…
Sunday mornings, she would gather eggs, slipping her hands beneath the white feathers, biddies murmuring in prayer. The warm globes felt like hers, the same way the beauty of shadow on the wreckage of truck did not surprise her, the same way the knife had missed her toe – of course it had – when…
for Janet Begin from the premise that your life’s your own again and you are free to tear through reedy fields shouting now, now, now at diving chickadees as if you were a dog awakened after death passed by, and now, all paws akimbo, means this time a sacred work, a wishing well, a friend…
Soap bubbles the size of silent whales float and founder from the wand of the prophet. Over and under, rippling in the swells of air, they roll and surge, at play until the pop that pulls them like a sentence back inside the lead. The prophet writes again: in each smooth behemoth a plea for…
Third Draft: In the Absence of a Word for a Woman Who Is Not a Mother “Your dream, then, is of a nothingness where an investment of love lives on.” ~ Charles D’Ambrosio Under the pitted crust of April snow, blind and rooting, everything waits. Even my resolve not to have babies, elegy, effigy, small…
