Appointment
By Barbara Crooker
"What doesn’t / in time enter Grief’s lexicon?" Danusha Laméris, “Glass” The first time seeing a new doctor, one of the standard questions is always How many children do you have? The one I don’t know how to answer. The naked truth: four, but one died seems like a blunt instrument, but three feels like a lie. She notices that my pressure is up, says she’ll come back for another reading, leaves me beached in the cold white room. Adrift on an iceberg, I remember how young I was, how nothing in the Lamaze books prepared me for the nurse unable to find a heartbeat, the doctor pretending there was nothing wrong. Until he couldn’t anymore. What I was like afterwards: an empty shell. And there were more questions: boy or girl? asked the cheerful checkout girl at the local grocery; her bafflement when I abandoned a week’s worth of groceries, unable to stutter out an answer. And where is she now, my sweet firstborn, the one I never held, never even got to see? She swam inside the ocean of my body for nine short months, safe and warm, but I failed to deliver her to the sandy shore. Oh, my little starfish, I see you floating in the dark night sky. Now I count my breaths, and a nurse returns, says I’m back to normal. Which is, of course, impossible, in this world without her in it.
Barbara Crooker is author of ten full-length books of poetry, including Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poetry Series), longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press; The Book of Kells, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea; and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and more.
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As the mother of a dead son, I have often wondered how to answer that dreaded question; "How many children do you have?" Like her, I have learned thst there is no true answer. Barbara Crooker has captured that puzzled despair.
Exquisite