Bedrest at Winnie Palmer

In this poem it wasn’t all for nothing: ten days of bedside peeing in white construction buckets in view of the room where we lost our son; the social worker, suited siren waving from the shores of sanity, worried I’m crying too much; the stuttered crawl of the wall clock’s second hand, ticking off another minute I’ve kept our daughter safe, kept her inside, kept her—this time, long enough.

When the Therapist Asks If I Can Stop Grieving

babies lost ten years ago

This time I agree to pack them up—the palm-sized son the pink-capped nurses dressed in tiny train pajamas, delivered in a wicker basket, perfect except for the stillness, which I’ll tuck next to the empty visage of his sister, whisked away and cut before I could, so I never would, see her in anything but these thin strips of already fading prints, ultrasound Rorschachs I let fall in this box of loss beside February dreams in which my children breathe and I live.

When I Join the Borg Collective

they will finally stop—all these feelings, piled up like drone parts, nanoprobes to grow my replacement heart, the metal kind, this time impenetrable. I wait—mind stilled, a smoked bee. No more poems will be necessary. No need to make sense of dandelion seeds, poets shot on Myanmar streets. The hive will assimilate it all—no need for speech—while the queen, collector of sorrows, scatters the bits of me, flips the m upside-down, turns me to we finally and finally.