Listen to Poems from Our August Issue

For six years we’ve taken no precautions
and my body has made no
third baby, nor have we plotted
to create another life, content
to let nature do what it would,

which was, this morning,
to release bright-red blood
into the toilet,
so vivid and sudden
in its burst it seemed almost
alive—followed by a little plop.

Child we will never have. End
of something.

In the meditation course I’m taking,
we are taught happiness is found
in the deep I, in the consciousness
of consciousness.
But I resist.

I want blood and bone.
I want to feel again our four-year-old
son asleep in my arms; I want
again the round sound of our daughter’s laughter,
her sharp, unapologetic cry.

I want relationship,
the grass that grows no place
but the earth,
this earth, the stubbly
green beneath our bare
feet when we ran on the lawn,
the rich smell of dirt, the pebbles,
the grit, those summers when
we were all so much younger
and didn’t know we had such gifts.

Just as now, our children almost grown,
we hardly know this is as close
to heaven as we can come—

the planet on the brink of so many changes, the ice
already melting at the poles—

and see: these tiny red tomatoes on the plants,
little globes of sun, offerings
we pick and eat whole.

Better Yet
By Jim Moore

—for Maryka, Aaron, and LuLu

Wanting to go beyond where I’ve already been:
Isn’t that supposed to be a good thing to do?
Then why would I rather go all the way back to the day
before I was born? Second-longest day of the year,
a beautiful June morning in Decatur, Illinois.
A mother-to-be, a father-to-be, such happiness
in the prospect. As for me, I was swimming
in my mother’s ocean, getting closer to shore.
Eyes closed, the tide coming and going.
Air was a thing so far away I didn’t need to give it
any thought at all. Afterward it was about as could be
expected: happiness, sadness, confusion, shame, grief, joy.
All well and good, but better yet to be surrounded
on all sides by buoyancy. To be
about to be, eyes shut, kicking away
for all I’m worth
inside a huge darkness:
that’s the life for me!