I now pronounce you your own. Give you back your names, put down those titles: Mother, Father, Wife, Husband. I pronounce you whole. Better apart, but still better for once having found each other. I pronounce you human. Both the stove and the hand that touches it, if only to learn what burns. I pronounce your every scar well earned, roads on a worn map you used to find your way home. I pronounce you home and road. Minute and hour hand, together briefly, moving forward. I pronounce you the golden leaf and its inevitable fall. I pronounce you deserving of space to change, the hydrangea moved from its pot into earth, roots stretched out like an unclenched fist. I pronounce you worthy of looking back with gentle eyes. Both the one who held me in the backseat, my bleeding knee in your lap, and the steady hand that drove us to the hospital. I pronounce you both free and forever bound, your four children stitched between you like the binding of a book sewed together by hand. I pronounce you the pages and the cover that encases them. Both the story I know and the one you wrote without me.
Caroline Earleywine is a poet and educator who taught high school English in Central Arkansas for ten years. She earned her MFA from Queens University in Charlotte, and Sibling Rivalry Press published her chapbook, Lesbian Fashion Struggles, in 2020. She is a Jack McCarthy Book Prize winner and her debut full-length collection, I Now Pronounce You, will be out with Write Bloody Publishing in April 2024. She lives in Little Rock with her wife and two dogs. You can keep up with her work at carolineearleywine.com.
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This poem speaks forcefully of the complication of love and loss, marriage and separation. The couplet form is a nice choice for these dualities and the repeated coupling of images reinforces this sense of both/and: it is love and loss, joy and pain, tenderness and alienation. Thanks for this poem.