Thrush Poetry Journal
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Nicole Rollender
​

In the Silence After the Other Driver T-Boned Our Car, I Looked
Into the Rear-View Mirror to See if My Children Were Alive


If I’m not dead, it feels as if I am, waking into a haze: this memory
          through leaves turning to mirage. Because there was a hawk, 

his heart circling in a slow metronome as glass prismed into our
          hair. You inhabited a lost country I can never remember―

within me, one I am sick for—there’s no returning. Because I thought
          I’d never be a mother—that desire never pitting in my gut 

as a calm gravity—no glory in planting tiny bones—fingers my ribcage’s
          marginalia. A statue of a Madonna on a lawn beyond. My heart’s

sad tap dance—what predawn dreams in the womb, me leading
          my daughter to a field where a white mare dozed, her foal

lifting its head toward my child who saw something of herself—their
          newness that’s already waning—a knotting together that prepared

them for disassembling—it’s been like waiting for a ghost—I’m holy, 
          winded, full of panic—I’m tired of being in a body—yet I lived,

lived—if there was a way to turn my bone broth to light because living
          this way—head knocked this way, brain bruised—because all 

I can do is bend and pick my children as daisies—place them
          behind my ears—these days I feel like I’m walking

to the world’s edge—when I look over—my children shine―
          when the glass prismed—when they first realized bodies could break―

when my head hit—when my shoulder blades knocked loose—when 
          what I wanted—flight, to hold their tiny skulls in my arms—when

I think I am no longer a mother—a mother who doesn’t have the chance
          to walk back—to hold a baby in the middle of a field—to say,

my bones are in you—if I go to the sky—if I, if I—I can’t bear this, to die.




​
Nicole Rollender is editor of Stitches. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, The Journal, Radar Poetry, Salt Hill Journal, West Branch, Word Riot and others. Her first full-length poetry collection, Louder Than Everything You Love, is forthcoming from ELJ Publications. She is the author of the chapbooks Arrangement of Desire (Pudding House Publications), Absence of Stars (dancing girl press & studio), and Ghost Tongue (Porkbelly Press, 2016). She’s the recipient of poetry prizes from CALYX Journal, Ruminate Magazine and Princemere Journal. Find her online at nicolerollender.com  or facebook.com/nicole.rollender.




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