Caesura
by Erin Rodini
I remember hearing about them, the babies my Grandma never had,
and though I’d never held such a seed in my body, I felt the want
of them. Five children with ghost-spaces between. She believed
unbaptized souls went to Limbo, which to me meant low,
so I saw them spread like mica in the soil beneath her roses,
and in the gauze of grasshoppers that rose with every step
through summer grass. On my Grandma’s ranch, I watched
a barn cat lick her living kittens clean, leaving some still
sacked. Little grapes, their mother’s warmth unreplaced by their own.
When I bled, I locked the bathroom door. Later, I pressed a still-
frame of my only ultrasound inside my Grandma’s copy
of The Secret Garden. Little unblossom, little mausoleum.
I’m not religious anymore, but I grew up with God,
the grandfatherly one who knew I was bad sometimes,
but loved me anyway, and I could always talk to. It’s a hard habit
to break in the cathedral of my sleeping daughters, that consecrated dark
gauzed in white-noise, a halo of nightlight. My prayers are always
some variation of Don’t you dare, and Please. Somehow, I know he was a boy.
The middle brother. So little now, so nothing. My daughters don’t know
the word God. They know earth and death and rain. They’ve watched
that silent sleight of hand replace a caterpillar with an iridescent bud
of wings. They’ve seen me clutch a spider between paper and a plastic cup,
only to crush a mosquito against their bedroom wall, its body smeared
with our family’s mingled blood. They are learning to be merciful
doesn’t mean to be good, only powerful enough to choose.
After our cat died my oldest kept asking Where is she? I know she’s dead
but where is she? First, I spun a heaven-place, then I changed my mind,
stood her barefoot in the garden and said Here, look down.
The dirt is full of root and bone. Oh, my darlings we are so small.
Lie down, back to summer grass. Feel how we are always falling
into that star-spread black expanse. And feel too
the way the earth holds us and we are held.
Erin Rodoni is the author of Body, in Good Light (Sixteen Rivers Press, 2017) and A Landscape for Loss (NFSPS Press, 2017), which won the 2016 Stevens Award sponsored by the National Federation of State Poetry Societies. Her poems have been included in Best New Poets 2014, nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and honored with awards from AWP and Ninth Letter. She lives in the San Rafael, CA, with her husband and two young daughters.
