Editor’s Note: The poet, through many fine and surprising images, describes the miniature miracle of her newborn grandchild.

Week One

She sleeps and eats, and all the while stays curled
as though still inside my daughter’s body,
in that thick calm of muffled sound that held her,
must be soothing her still
here in the room though none of us can feel it.

She is fine like a ringlet of fiddlehead fern
before it unfurls in the summer forest,
spiraled frond, close to the ground,
most of the plant still root and rhizome
hidden beneath the earth.

Her face, placid as a newly polished stone,
that sits with its perfect even weight
in the curve of an open palm.

All afternoon the soft snail of her
sleeps on her father’s chest.

Editor’s Note: Amazing how the poet has used the small container of a cell phone to convey so much sadness and longing.

Bus Stop

Stubborn sleet. Traffic stuck on Sixth.
We cram the shelter, soaked, strain
to see the bus, except for a man next to me,
dialing his cell-phone. He hunches,
pulls his parka’s collar over it, talks slow and low:
It’s daddy, hon. You do? Me too. Ask mom
if I can come see you now. Oh, okay,
Sunday then. Bye. Me too baby. Me too.
He snaps the phone shut, cradles it to his cheek,
holds it there. Dusk stains the sleet, minutes
slush by. When we board the bus,
that phone is still pressed to his cheek.

Laure-Anne Bosselaar was born in 1943. She grew up in Belgium and moved to the United States in 1987. Fluent in four languages, she has published poems in French and Flemish and translates American poetry into French and Dutch poetry into English. She is the author of These Many Rooms (Four Way Books, 2019); A New Hunger (Ausable Press, 2007); Small Gods of Grief (BOA Editions, 2001), which won the Isabella Gardner Prize for Poetry; and The Hour Between Dog and Wolf (BOA Editions, 1997). This poem was included in A New Hunger (Ausable Press 2007) and posted here with permission of the author.

Editor’s Note: The mother in this poem is working very hard to connect with her daughter at this important juncture in both their lives. Her physical exertions seem to be a stand-in for the emotions and words she can’t say. The images do a powerful job of conveying both the mother’s sadness—sagging carton, slumping rice and lentils, stooped and pinned body—and the daughter’s remoteness—the spiny cactus—while the last line’s poignant image reveals the mother’s sense of failure. 

Helping My Daughter Move into Her First Apartment

This is all I am to her now:
a pair of legs in running shoes,

two arms strung with braided wire.
She heaves a carton sagging with CDs

at me and I accept it gladly, lifting
with my legs, not bending over,

raising each foot high enough
to clear the step. Fortunate to be

of any use to her at all,
I wrestle, stooped and single-handed,

with her mattress in the stairwell,
saying nothing as it pins me,

sweating, to the wall. Vacuum cleaner,
spiny cactus, five-pound sacks

of rice and lentils slumped
against my heart: up one flight

of stairs and then another,
down again with nothing in my arms.

Sue Ellen Thompson is the author of six books of poetry—most recently SEA NETTLES: NEW & SELECTED POEMS. She has taught at Middlebury College, Binghamton University, Wesleyan University, Central Connecticut State University, and the University of Delaware. A resident of Oxford, MD, for the past 19 years, she has been mentoring adult poets and teaching workshops at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda. In 2010, the Maryland Library Association awarded her its prestigious Maryland Author Award.

Editor’s Note: Love always seems to find a way in, no matter what the external circumstances, making even the end of the world seem something one could acclimate to if the right person were beside you. Since post-apocalypse movies seem to be so popular these days, I thought I’d share this poem of love in the time of an imagined post-apocalypse. 

Love Poem for an Apocalypse

I wish I’d met you after everything had burned,
after the markets crash and global sea levels rise.
The forests scorched. The grasslands trespassed.
My love, it is a whole life’s work to disappear—
ask the god with his head in the wolf’s mouth or
the serpent intent on swallowing all the earth.
Ask the senate subcommittee for market solutions
for late capitalism and early-onset dementia.

You and a bird flu could make me believe in fate.
I think we might be happy in the end, in the dark
of a hollow tree, a seed bank or blast-proof bunker,
if only you would sing the song I love, you know
the one about our precious eschatology, the one
I always ask to hear to lull me back to sleep.

Dave Lucas is an American poet born in Cleveland, Ohio. He is the author of Weather (University of Georgia Press, 2011) which was awarded the 2012 Ohioana Book Award for Poetry. He is the recipient of a Henry Hoyns Fellowship from the University of Virginia and a Discovery/The Nation Prize in 2005, and his poems have appeared in many journals including Poetry Magazine, Slate, Blackbird, The Paris Review, The Threepenny Review and Virginia Quarterly Review. He was the second Poet Laureate of the state of Ohio from 2018 to 2019. He received his B.A. at John Carroll University, M.F.A. in creative writing at the University of Virginia, and M.A. and Ph.D. in English language and literature at the University of Michigan. This poem is posted here with permission of the author.