Renee Emerson
We stay inside when it is storming.
My mother always took us out in the rain,
sky large and ominous as a history
selected by men who’ve never heard
of our town. Lightning a password
into a natural fury, my mother
did not hold us in the wind, though
some of us were young enough
to straddle her hip, hands in her hair.
A Bradford pear we climbed
every afternoon that summer, when
the air pressed in on the lungs
and our skin was damp with
morning, broke at the trunk,
knocked teeth out from the privacy fence
between our house and the house of strangers.
The force blew the door open, an invitation.
Our shirts wet and clinging like a stain,
our hair curling in youth and water,
each storm was a sermon; we sat quietly in it,
forbidden from fidgeting. All I remember
is how she never looked at any of us.
All I remember is how she looked up.
Failure to Thrive
Nurse, let me hold her without wires,
without the tangle of alert,
the spider web to trap her living,
let me slip my hands beneath
her to lift her up a moment.
Each week doctors dot her descent
along the arch of growth chart,
my infant Persephone, I borrow
her from the other side.
She isn’t a percentile, she’s born
below. Turns blue as seawater,
normal for her kind, moon given
moon taken.
Nurse, show me what seizure looks like,
what to call out when her eyes see past me
to look at the far fields a newborn should
never know
show me how to lure a body back
with her mother’s breath.
Open Heart Surgery, 6 months
In the conversation, a mother has lost
her child, baby’s jaw clenched against
breath. The mother says the child’s name
like an old calendar, which days
has she circled? Questions in the interview,
incantations against repeating her loss.
I will never do anything she did.
Every death is a mother’s fault,
so I will hold you long hours before
the surgeon’s knife comes for you.
You didn’t know you were growing all wrong,
veins stretching toward lungs, anatomy
finger-painted to work close to right.
You sleep and heave for air, too tired
to be greedy, to grasp like a hand
over hand up a rope. As frayed, as tender.
When I take you to the surgeon,
my Moses baby in the bulrushes,
my Snow White to her woodsman,
I will place you in his kind arms.
