You’ll miss the moth that thumbed between
your window, at twenty, & its silk-spun
morse code for yearning. But there it is,
the expanse between it-could-be & it-already-
has-been. Your babe’s outgrown the swaddle.
Your mother stopped trying to know you &
there’s no coffin filled with sparrows
at the end. It’s an uneasy profile, grief.
Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick's work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Gulf Coast Journal, Salamander Magazine, The Texas Observer, The Missouri Review, Four Way Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, and Passages North, among others. Hardwick serves as the Editor-in-Chief for The Boiler Journal.
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