Three Poems by Katy Luxem

When an Alpaca Gives Birth It’s Called an Unpacking

My children, when checking in to a hotel,
spread their stuff from corner to corner.
Their bedrooms at home are little dens
of shed items, hoodies, baby teeth in molar-shaped
containers, flattened volleyballs, autographs
on rumpled school forms. Of course, when they were
born I left pieces of myself all sorts of places, locked
like wings in amber, measured in forehead wrinkles,
angled in jaw lines, height marked on walls like cave paintings.
I understand laying out what makes us. To be so full
of the world, that it gives us place, says I know, I know
I am here, I am undeniably in it.

*

In Years Ahead

I find an email draft of baby names
we didn’t use. Some my husband didn’t like
and it’s funny to think of our arguments then,
before kids, how young and vast
the world stretched. How much time we let drift
without christening it ours. Certain names
didn’t seem to fit once something so pink and alert
was placed slick in my arms. Some we assigned
to loss, which always makes me think of January.
Looking at the list, we chose well, though. Because
I close my eyes and it is the real ones I behold.
The girl on stage, their old crib, the boy who loves
hashbrowns, the bunny she sleeps with, still.
Anyway, it’s just a draft, stored only in a cloud
somewhere it’ll never rain or break. In my imagination,
they are wearing new shoes, blowing out
birthday candles, jumping in gravel-deep puddles.
In real life they exist nowhere but the outline
of what we imagined.

*

To Have / Be a Teenager

is to worry about the minutiae
of things and yet, throw caution
away accidentally. My daughter
sometimes stares bleakly
at a screen or a steamy mirror.
Sometimes questions everything,
worrying out every option
but the most obvious. And yet
I see her eat the cheese danish
I bring home. I watch her feed
the dog and it is like seeing a neighbor
I don’t know yet through a bright
window. Just yesterday morning,
she watered plants in a square
of light, and I heard the sound
of singing. It was so beautiful
even though it was a song
I could not ever hope to name.

*

Katy Luxem lives in Salt Lake City. She is a graduate of the University of Washington and has a master’s degree from the University of Utah. Her work is anthologized in Love Is For All Of Us (Hachette, 2025) and has appeared in Rattle, McSweeney’s, SWWIM Every Day, Sugar House Review, Poetry Online, and others. She is the author of Until It Is True (Kelsay Books, 2023).