Poetry |

“And: Still”

And: Still

 

I am a child of

 no one alive,

 

   no one who

    can remember

            my name.

 

Fathers,

mothers,

grand,

and great —

they are gone.

 

My child, will you consider this:

 

His name was Aylan, three years old.

            Washed up, face down in a red T-shirt on a Turkish beach.

                        On the way to a country that already

      denied him asylum.

 

                        __

 

I was thinking about attention. Not being there.

    And I didn’t notice what happened.

                        The last two eggs simply

                   fell out of myself, tumbling —

 

                        __

 

A hospital CEO, rushing to attend a series of meetings

       in Perry Iowa, accidentally

      left her daughter in a minivan in 90 degree heat.

 

                        __

 

It’s evening and people are still jogging, as if they’re running out of time.

 

                        __

 

    My child, will you consider this:

                        __

 

I wouldn’t hold her.

Couldn’t.

                                    Baby girl.

I’d have to give her back.

  She’d

never be mine.     She’d

    always belong to another.        Why

  feel that:      cradle until she

   cries and

          give her up?

               Curled in arms, rocked, just to return

her. No:

       I place tips of fingers on her cold toes.

Size of my fingernail they were.

         She didn’t seem to notice. Or, maybe, she seemed to      accept it.

    Gazing through me she was. As if I weren’t

  there. I’m of two minds: the smallest orchid,

            just discovered in a cloud forest:

                   unnamed. I almost wish

              we had never found

                        it.

 

                        __

 

No childe, but I assemble (Old French a(s)semble-r)

the list I would have made:

            Prenatal vitamins

            Folic acid

            Bathroom scale

            Fertility monitoring device

            Donor egg program

            IVF

 

       Asleep, I once dreamt of a blonde child — page-boy hair cut,

   head tilted sideways as if habitual, with me; sea-blue eyes.

       Waving at me — he was mine, my boy. Was he waving hello or

           goodbye. He never returned. The frame tight,

                        no

perspective.

 

                        __

 

         Does the lotus

really close its petals at night and sink underwater

     to rise and open at dawn? On second thought: don’t tell.

 

One could argue the brilliance of Velázquez was that

                        even his infantas were depicted with profound individuality,

                                    so lifelike Philip IV supposedly

                           barked What, are you still here?

                  Painted in a flash of brushstrokes

—abstract up close, always on the verge

of dissolution.

Now.

And: still —

 

 

Contributor
Page Hill Starzinger

Page Hill Starzinger’s new collection of poems is Vortex Street (Barrow Street Press). She is also the author of the poetry collection Vestigial (Barrow Street, 2013). Her chapbook, Unshelter, selected by Mary Jo Bang, was published in 2009. Her poems have appeared in Colorado Review, Fence, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Volt, and many others.

Posted in Poetry

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