“Daughter”

Content Warning

This work depicts child loss.

An image of a poem. It reads: Daughter, when you died, words grew hazy, lost their meanings. Now grief is a dry riverbed, desolate with shells and echoes of birdcry or the wails we made in your place. Shell is what's left when a body shrivels: a permanent testament to impermanence. Smog is my mind on migraine: nebulous, it is the nameless pulp of you, never born. Daughter, you were gravity, a cosmic glow accreting lucent skin and heart thumps, sable hair and self. Self is the breath I leave floating as I rush alone from grief to grief.

“Daughter,” Prairie Schooner, Vol. 97.1 (Spring), December 2023, page 95.

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