I wanted you to come unbidden—
rainwater pooled in cracked cement,
wild mint caught in the wheel spoke.
I wanted you, eyeless, to see
how I huddled over poems
as penguins with broken eggs
nestle scraps of ice between their feet.
How everything I coaxed into hatching
melted. How I cast spell after spell
waiting for you. Men in white coats
sifted vials of my blood. Cold
instruments and sonogram
mapped my interior like rivers,
found no answers. I lived
at the center of my country then,
where even as soil washed away,
inch by inch, gold kernels
fattened on every stalk. I walked
the desert, where juniper trees
sipped rain in a crook of sand, alive
against all reason. By firelight I wrote,
The rock has no children, dreamed myself
barren and wind-scored, hammered
into spires. I wanted to bury you
under rabbitbrush and thistle, nameless,
faceless, genderless. But you refused
to lie down, little one. I refused to leave.
This poem first appeared in Mid-American Review. Thanks to my fellow contributors, Molly Spencer and Jennifer K. Sweeney, for their kind words in the interviews linked below.
Sarah Burke’s “The Rock Has No Children” is a deeply affecting poem in which the grief and refusal to surrender are portrayed exquisitely. It is also very much speaking to my poem; it’s a lonely conversation to live, and I was moved by how her poems and mine bookend the issue and perhaps provide a larger parenthetical relationship.
I really love Sarah Burke’s poem “The Rock Has No Children” for all of its beautiful, rough images and its oblique approach to infertility. Her lines “But you refused / to lie down, little one” really touched me. For me, these words speak to all the things in our lives that take root in poor soil, that hold on in spite of it.
Sarah Burke 