~ ONE ART’s Top 10 Most-Read Poets of March 2024 ~
Tag: Wendy Kagan
Ode to My Miscarried One by Wendy Kagan
Ode to My Miscarried One
You, remote as a star—
all you knew was a kind of
floating.
Undulant, slight
as a comma
mote, iota, seedling.
You, magnolia blossom
silken, blush-colored cup
already fringed with brown
before yawning fully open.
You roomed in me just six weeks.
Those days, I called to you
hushed, staticky transmissions
returned to sender.
You, thought bubble
zealots’ unborn
sanctity without a face.
The world is exhausting—
no wonder you retreated
into a sloop of the uterus
that had shored up its moorings
to protect you.
Time was a dream you never woke to.
You simply stopped
growing
then spilled out in a red rush, curdled and thick
as mother’s milk gone bad.
You, soaker
though in that crimson river I saw
nothing of you.
Life sped on without you
who had best expressed its lavish excess:
bright cellular confetti.
Oh, nature’s spare
understudy
I fell in love a little
when your hazy half-light being
brushed against mine.
Why else would I find myself
after the terrible, echoey ultrasound
crying in chrome stirrups
riding your reachless
void, my womb
hollow as a death bell?
*
Wendy Kagan lives in New York’s Catskill mountain foothills. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as The Poetry Distillery, Eunoia Review, Chronogram, and The Baffler. Wendy holds an MA in English from Columbia University. Her chapbook Blood Moon Aria was long-listed for the Yellow Arrow Publishing 2024 chapbook competition.
Ghost period by Wendy Kagan
Ghost period
Then the heat vanished
and she was here again:
my maidenhood, a vestige of her,
come for one more visit
(six months after
what I thought was her last)
to leave behind
her pale pink plush—
barely there, translucent
as a moth’s wing-print.
Just as the tattered heads
of asters, on warm
November days, peek out late
then get snowed over,
she was out of
step with the order of things
but I flickered up to see her anyway
as if meeting an old flame
who’d given no end of trouble
yet still brought stirrings.
She came without throbs
that some might feel
the pelvis a bowl of fire
empty as a phantom limb.
No, this body
declared it was
a kid again, all day
I felt the old currents
cartwheel through
*
Wendy Kagan lives and writes in a converted barn in New York’s Hudson River Valley. Her poems have appeared in The Baffler, Chronogram, and Poetry Distillery. She was named a finalist for the David Wade Hogue Poetry Scholarship “Martha Award” in 2022.