Three Poems by Rae McMinn

Heirloom

World War II era
Brandywine tomato seeds
pool on my cutting board,
the same jelly of rubies
my great-grandmother
wiped off her kitchen knife.

What will you leave behind?

I have a friend
who wants to be a mummy.
You can’t just burn this,
she gestures at her body.
I’ll buy a crown of rubies
let them think I was a queen.

*

Underbabied

There’s a game show host in the Oval Office/ thumbs up, white guy/ you know the type, hair plugs/ on a winning streak, suit cost a cool 10K/ announcing on TV that America is in critical condition/ the state underbabied, an underbabied state/ a particularly nasty disorder/ of too many empty uteruses bleeding/ the system dry/ pill-popping progestin queens on permanent vacation/ and I am at the nurses station/ stringing beads on a bracelet for the patient in room 12 whose baby/ just died in utero, whose uterus/ just hopped a plane to Fiji, whose heart/ is as underbabied as a clear cut, whose heart/ is as underbabied as the last black rhino/ I’m here stringing beads/ in late stage capitalism/ outside, ash drops from a chalky sky/ the nurse next to me asks/ if half points will be awarded/ for the babies we tried to make.

*

Parenting

At the nurses station, Megan is telling us about her session with a medium. You have to know this woman, she has two feet on the ground. She’s the real deal adult you desperately wish had the keys to the solar system. But last year, her mom died of ALS, and before she did, she promised her daughter that if there was a way to reach over, she would find it. She would be there. She’d be reaching.

Tell me, who on this mortal earth would not reach back?

It takes a long time. Megan is skeptical, keeps the details tight to her chest. Her grandpa cuts the line and talks for a hundred years. Then the medium begins to rock her arms, back and forth like she is cradling a baby. The medium asks, Who is the baby that your mom is holding?

They’d put off a baby when her mom got sick. Now, Megan confides that she is pregnant and the medium says, Ohhh, says, your mom wants you to know she’s got your baby. A daughter, yes? Says, She wants to tell you how wonderful she is. How you’re just gonna love her. How she loves her so much already.

She wants you to know she’ll take care of her until she’s ready to come to you.

Al has been charting with her back to us. Now she turns around and tells us a girl she knew in high school, some girl she hadn’t talked to in twenty years, reached out to her with a message:

Hey, this is so random.
I went to see this psychic and um, it was cool, but anyway, at the end, she asked me if I knew anyone whose parents died in a national park. So specific, right? So I said, well yeah, that happened to this girl I knew in high school, and this psychic said, you should get a hold of her.

Let her know her parents are trying to reach her.

*

Rae McMinn is a labor and delivery nurse, mother and emerging poet living in Portland, Oregon. She has published and forthcoming works in Wayfarer magazine, Sybil journal, and WayWords magazine, among others and has just finished writing her first collection of poetry.