poppy ovenbird I hope you didn’t think, little one, that I had forgotten you today. Almost 15 years have passed but my body remembers. I called you Poppy, because you were the size of the tiniest seed when you first made yourself known. You are Poppy forever, because you never got the chance to grow into another name. When I am asked, as I occasionally am, how many children I have, I feel it like a blow. I say two, because that is the answer that doesn’t mean excavating loss. But what I mean to say, every time, is three. Two that walk in the world and one that doesn’t except as a chimera carried in the bodies of my son and daughter, a shadow of memory built into their own DNA. It’s mother’s day. And you are the one who made me a mother. Hardly anyone knows this secret. It is a truth that circles like a hawk, beautiful and deadly. If I let myself wander I can be right inside the day you left for good. I’m holding what remains of everything you were supposed to be in the cupped palm of my hand, but you are like oceans, uncontainable, and I can no longer distinguish blood from tears. I did not want the gift of carrying you from birth to death. I did not want your birth and death to be the same. But I have learned that motherhood demands this–an initiation into grief that sucks the marrow from your bones and leaves you undone. My life began again when I peeled myself off the bathroom floor, and stood for the first time, a mother with no child to sing to sleep. In the aftermath you spoke to me. Not in words but in symbols and signs. I was in bed the afternoon you left me, tending to my body that seemed set to bleed out and to my mind that craved the same. The mail arrived and amidst the flyers and bills was an art magazine I subscribed to, the cover splashed with red, and a title that announced “the poppy edition.” And when the pages flew open every page was poppies and every page was you. 250511 what's it to you? who go blather from