Susan Pollet, Mother and Child (Artist Website, Instagram, Twitter/X)
Acrylic on canvas
There’s no evidence inner radiance is a gift
let alone exists. The gemstones in our pockets
weren’t doing shit, those certainties little more
than impressions. That it was going to be a her.
That we’d leave the party early, our miscarried
words held at the partition of your body
confessing anything we could think to confess.
Forgive us our faith in delivery drivers,
damaged parcels, the preemptive Big Brother T-shirt
with a hole in the arm. Forgive us for noticing
a doe lowing in the yard, three crows as an omen
of abundance, flowers after rain, that doe only now
with a fawn and our own belief it was the same
her as before and that she liked us. There’s no evidence
any of this was a dream or that a dream has meaning
other than the dreamer is alive and full of names.
The way a body is a reliquary of never-meants
wombed in whatever way makes them easiest to forget.
In the morning, we’re certain this is grief and will last
because we feel so far from wonder. Certain the measure
of a good name is not what it represents but what it can be
shortened to. Peri or Dot. To have called out either
and waited for a voice in return. There’s no evidence
without its searching. We can hardly bear to look.