Day 3

[poem was here]

Day 2

[poem was here]

Day 1

[poem was here]

nightwaking

This time last year I was waiting for Ella to be born, imagining the scent and heft of her, already feeling the whole of her, watching her body rise and fall, even inside of me. For months after she was born, I was terrified of losing her. Those were yellow days, but night came: I would call her angel, and a thrush of a thousand wings would take her from me. She's not like her sister; she wakes so easily that I cannot go to her and place my hand on her chest, and so I find myself sneaking into her room--the streetlight shadows uncertainly static--and I stand (a mad bird) above her crib, straining my ears to hear her breathe, waiting and waiting, until I can finally go, run cold water into a glass before trying, again, to put myself to sleep.

Vehicle

Tell us what you know about the heart, I write on the board. The boy from Senegal, the one who put up drywall in Bed-Stuy in last summer's heat takes out his mechanical pencil. I have never been a fan of the sleek, plastic objects, opting more often for yellow wood. I remember buying my seventh grade science teacher a pen that was marketed as having been "used by the astronauts." He worried about me. He once stopped to get gas when he was driving me home. People will try to take advantage of you, he said, and he said it in the way that said he was making a conscious decision not to take advantage of me. He would just take me home, he seemed to be telling himself; he would make sure I got in safe, wave. Those days, I took too many rides. I don't know where my parents were, or if they shrugged their shoulders when other people complained about shuttling children around. These days, I use a pen. Black, inky. I dip its tip in the well of my heart and hope for things to say.

Valentine 2

[poem was here]

Terrarium

Yesterday, I chased Eva with a Q-tip,
and finally caught her, pinned

her down, like some exotic, menacing
butterfly, my knees on her elbows--

Just let me clean your ears. I growled.
She kicked, cried. But it was before then

when I went to find the Q-tips
that I thought, Sarah, of you.

They were on the highest shelf
(ears not being our top priority);

I had removed them from their blue box,
and they were in a glass jar, a jar

that had once been a homemade terrarium,
a gift from a friend who had driven

twenty-seven hours with two sick boys
and a moody man just to sleep on my floor.

It's its very own eco-system, she said.
Reaching into that jar, I thought of child-you,

of how child-you must have worn her hair,
of how child-you must have read Ramona Quinby,

and then there was the child-you (pensive) who
was told of her mother's death, the child-you

who must have stood on the other side
of doors, the child-you who might, one night,

have gone looking for Q-tips, pulling out drawers,
ripping through cabinets. Don't touch it,

my friend told me. It seemed, at first,
this Missouri-made world might really thrive,

might bloom impossibly. My heart ached.
Maybe I held Eva down harder than

I would have. Finally, she gave in. I swept the tip
all around. Some girls don't have anyone

to clean their ears, I told her. How do you think
that would feel? By then, she had wriggled

her way free. I stood there alone, feeling the heat
of the light that pressed in on our windows.