March 2020
Across the continent capable of light speed
my mother’s voice
finds me at the sink
How many times have we laid eyes
laid hands on each other since I left home
One flight for every year a mile for every breath
my guess is thirty-nine is that good
or bad for a lifetime
There’s a plague on outside
No one believes in touching any more
Three hours south my daughter holds a photo
delivered by echoes
impossible to hear
Though no one could have been closer
alone on the table in her paper gown
Blizzard in a jar
storm of cells
and the tiny head bent as if under their weight
My mother asks for news
I triangulate
daughter mother me the distance we have to go
Fields outside wet with green alarm
Earth siphoning off whatever it needs to grow
When the time comes
I won’t slide easily into the universal palm
too many sutures
Even though I once believed the dead go on living
Even though I walked tonight
to feel swaddling twilight on my skin
Like an infant fed and soothed
Like this woman at her sink
two fists
tears feeding the drain’s mouth
Umbilical
Tin Fogdall’s work appears in Slate, Green Mountains Review, Your Impossible Voice, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Threepenny Review, and Poetry, among other venues. She grew up in Seattle, Washington and earned her M.A. in creative writing from Boston University. Recently she was named a finalist for the Missouri Review’s Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. She runs a communications consulting practice for education and nonprofits based in northern Vermont.