antiBODY
An Anthology of Poetry and Medicine Main Menu Foreword Introduction At the Teaching Hospital by Dan Kraines Atrophy by Paul Blom Barnacled to the Bone by Stephen C. Middleton Biopsy by Julie Rosenzweig Blood Truck by Sophie Summertown Grimes Choke by Alyson Miller Dead See Scroll by Rich Murphy Deciding Not to Wear Glasses by Donna J. Gelagotis Lee Discovery: Negative Return by Tara Skurtu Exile by Lane Falcon Flush by Stephen Mead Fruit By Tyler Chadwick Grandmother Dead, Then Alive, Then Dead Again by Matthew Baker Hysteria by Donna J. Gelagotis Lee If Not Absolution by Matthew Baker Mirena by Meagan Grant Mittelschmerz by Sarah Kersey Moon Child by Lisa Hiton pecan, rodef, clam by Susan Comninos Refugees by Walt Peterson She Cannot Let Him Go by Nancy Smiler Levinson Some Days Begin Like This by Tara Skurtu The Mechanics of Love by Victoria Gatehouse The Needle by Isla McKetta There Was Beauty in That Graph by Geralyn Pinto [Untitled] by Nan Darbous Marthaller [Untitled] by Nan Darbous Marthaller Contributors

Lack

18022
by Sarah Anderson Wood



The making of you went
horribly wrong
but I am still at it,
some lingering construction
that defies my better sense.
Fruitless imagining.
Inside me where I cannot see
there is the site of where you were.
Cells must remain, surely,
maybe in a bloodstream
in a pocket
of organs,
hidden before I had to
let you be taken from me.
 
You are a lack,
an amputation,
not for the holding or viewing.
I open and fold flat
the clothes bought for you
repeated tactile memorial—
embroidered birds on pale fabric.
Each item bought with intention
of zipping you in, buttoning you up,
nursing you in.
 
 
Of your body, there will speak
two handprints, two footprints only
smaller than a doll’s
pressed after they took you from me
from the tiny body I never laid eyes on.
 
I cannot pursue you
though I doubtless will
(touching fabric, writing words)
seeking the time of us,
the part of me where you once prodded
insistent in our revelry.

 

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