There is a ghost that claws beneath my skin– it grips at my lungs until I forget to breathe, and holds onto my heart ’til there is no beat;
there is a ghost that crawls through every inner room, puts red tags on all of my things; tells me I am failing, falling, crashing, as I try to triage every little thing.
But that laundry basket is green maybe black: stationary unmoving it’s not going anywhere and I can wear clothes out of a basket for another week.
Last night’s dinner dishes are yellow tagged: they can wait until today’s dinner is cooking.
Child’s plea to play: red red red like love like life-blood like you can put the chores away, red like you can soak in this moment and this day.
Red like your life depends on it Yellow like the chimney needs to be cleaned Green like the laundry basket
Tag it black: if it is unmoving, if it can wait another day, if it never mattered anyway.
“I am alive and well, I release what doesn’t belong to me…”
i wear my heart like a third eye — it rests on my forehead, sees the world too close, too much, too all-at-once
and it belongs to breaking; repeats a mantra to come back together again, but still whispers a combatant confession: i have seen/felt too much to release.
“I am alive and well, I am loved, supported, and in control…”
…and still– not. head too controlled by third eye heart; heart too overwhelmed by moving world
and belly: quakes in response aches in response to third eye and heart combined;
asks head: why are you wearing your heart like that?
heart whispers back: so i can see. and head feels. and belly quakes/aches/breaks.
a body in thirds, centred; heart as third eye: imbalance.
Poet’s note: Every October, there is a bittersweetness in the air. To quote L.M. Montgomery, “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” October is the marking of my secondborn daughter’s birth, but it is also a marker of remembrance: as the month of Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Day (October 15th), I felt stirred to share two particular poems of mine. I am #oneinfour and will not be quiet about my experiences, both hopeful (as in Lydia) and mournful (as in The Cradle). I am glad to live in a world where there are Octobers, and where I am not alone. Thank you for reading. — Maxine
Lydia
There is an empty pit in my womb that cries out for the existence of you. Hoping this is not a test, but truth instead and even though we could never afford you and ends are hard enough to connect;
I still feel you, in the deepest part of my womb, feel your heart beating between mine, crying out with that old, familiar song: I love you, I love you, I love you; Lydia.
You already had a name, Daddy already saying “she” and “her” as if he knew, and craving to hold you, just as I did. Lydia, you already had a name. Lydia, a place reserved in our hearts. Lydia, never doubt you were wanted…
But Mommy and Daddy couldn’t afford you and we never intended to be rid of you. Though this empty pit in my womb is all for the best and just so you know, in your non-existence; I cried at the first sign that you were gone. Mourning you in the same fashion mothers mourn miscarriages.
Because Lydia, we loved you before we even knew for sure. Lydia, this empty womb waits for you. Lydia, Lydia Lydia; our joy was in a waltz with fear but we had such hope for you: A dream for our little family, my little dear.
and Mommy’s been here before, but there was never hope waiting There was never solidity, never the want, there was never you: our baby. Lydia, wait for me until we’re ready.
The test is now negative, guilt replacing you in my empty womb
But Lydia, I’ll wait for you.
The Cradle
This body was not carved correctly for a baby
That’s what I tell myself when you fell from my womb cradle dropping bloodied chunks of my uterine lining when I turned my stomach inside, outside, inside again (I tried to hold you in)
While my tree linings swung cradle from thin branch to thin branch only to crash, to fall, cradle and all; and I tried to hold you in, tried to carve my failing womb into a cradle to house you
And she fell from the womb too soon my womb, my body, unwilling to hold her in while my mind was so desperate to carve tree branches into something sturdy
but my womb was made up of something brittle inside and then tree branches snapped, then the cradle falls
And I wonder what my innards are carved from— whole pieces of the child that was beginning to stain my underthings Tree branches so brittle, this cradle might have been carved from bone and I’d give up my ribcage just to hold you in I’d give up my whole life just to know my body was carved correctly to make a cradle for the baby I miscarried
I’d become a carpenter just to cut down that tree before it falls, before cradle comes crashing down, baby and all and this was all happening inside of me, so I wonder: weren’t we carved from the same tree wasn’t my body strong enough to carve a cradle rather than a casket
Weren’t you strong enough to sleep through it all; Baby, sleep, don’t cry, don’t fall.
Lydia is previously published in Swimming with Elephants Publications’ Catching Calliope Winter 2015 edition and The Cradle is previously published in Parade, Swimming with Elephants Publications’ 2018 anthology.
Maxine L. Peseke is a writer, mother, and sometimes freelance editor; she also works closely with Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC, as an organizational assistant. She is currently living in a small Northern Ontario town, transplanted from New Mexico respectively where she originally met each of Saturday’s Sirens as part of the Albuquerque poetry community.
Since the pandemic, she has rejoined the group for regular virtual meetings.
into a day looking forward to the end, before the first bite of coffee nips at my lips
I’d like to fall asleep before I’ve even woken.
into a week wishing everybody could have a Wednesday holiday, just to offer midweek reprieve between Monday blues and Friday’s hopeful praise
I’d like to have a reason to wake up on Wednesdays again.
into a month wondering when summer fades into fall and what will September bring when July has already felt too long
I want to backtrack to November’s first snowfall.
into a year I’ve seen thirty of them now, and remember half as many: prior to twelve is foggy from sea of bad memories and trauma; beyond twenty, I have recollected memories and pushed more to the side, and I’d prefer the next ten years to be peaceful, and come in stride
But this hour pushes back, instead, stretched to infinity.
Maxine L. Peseke is a writer, mother, and sometimes freelance editor; she also works closely with Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC, as an organizational assistant. She is currently living in a small Northern Ontario town, transplanted from New Mexico respectively where she originally met each of Saturday’s Sirens as part of the Albuquerque poetry community.
Since the pandemic, she has rejoined the group for regular virtual meetings.
Maxine L. Peseke is a writer, mother, and sometimes freelance editor; she also works closely with Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC, as an organizational assistant. She is currently living in a small Northern Ontario town, transplanted from New Mexico respectively where she originally met each of Saturday’s Sirens as part of the Albuquerque poetry community.
Since the pandemic, she has rejoined the group for regular virtual meetings.
what hate really is you must feel it in your bones; hand-shaking anger that skips up collarbones; hate plays on your chest like a xylophone and lodges itself in your throat, crushes the song from your vocal chords.
Hate is a knee on your trachea.
Did hate feel that suffocating to you? That you had to choke the air out of another human? Did hate send you out the door, gun in hand, to bring home a dead body heavy on your shoulders?
Or was it fear?
Before you are acquainted with fear, you must return to childhood, when every shadow of a tree is a monster; before the tree was the monster, with the dead body of a black boy who ran away, left hanging as a symbol for all the world to see.
All the world saw and held their breath;
When George Floyd died in the span of seven minutes, on international news, I held my breath, too, and wondered what, or how, I would tell my daughter. My summer girl, who has already contemplated the meaning of her black skin, when a boy at seven years old told her “I don’t like you because you’re black.”
The magic left her.
You don’t know what loss really is, until you’re at a loss for words, and have to talk the magic back into your girl and remind her how much magic she truly has and tell her: black is not ugly.
Leah, your black is so beautiful.
An uprising ignites when my daughter asks about another black death on the news, and tells me, at age nine, “I don’t want to die because of the colour of my skin.” Hate is the lump in my throat that I swallow back, while anger curls in my fingertips and splits my knuckles from the inside out.
Hate was the knee on George Floyd’s trachea.
Hate was women at church looking at my daughter’s ultrasound picture and whispering about her “black lips” and “black nose.”
Hate is more names than I bear to list, more names than I could possibly list; Hate is a list of names that could be a poem on their own.
Hate stopped and frisked. Hate put a racist president in the White House. Hate pulled my daughter out of an airport line and searched through her hair.
Hate told my daughter she wasn’t beautiful, but Leah, your black is so so beautiful.
Before you know what hate really is, you need to stop, look in the mirror, and stare it in the face. And when you see it, put your hands up, Don’t. Shoot.
Or do.
When you finally know the hate in you, eradicate it. Abolish it. Emancipate it. Carve it out of your bones, Dislodge it from your throat, keep screaming until there’s nothing left.
With all the hate I am acquainted with, I will keep screaming until there’s nothing left; and when there’s nothing else left, I will say again: Leah, your black is so beautiful.
Maxine, and her eldest daughter Leah; Christmas 2019.
Maxine L. Peseke is a writer, mother, and sometimes freelance editor; she also works closely with Swimming with Elephants Publications, LLC, as an organizational assistant. She is currently living in a small Northern Ontario town, transplanted from New Mexico respectively (and most recently) where she originally met each of Saturday’s Sirens as part of the Albuquerque poetry community.
Since the pandemic, she has rejoined the group for regular virtual meetings.
My toes are prone to nails ingrown; I keep digging up my nailbeds, like a gardener turns soil to help flowers grow,
Though my feet were not made for flowers, so maybe I’m made of more tree limbs; but resounding cracks are telltale sign of a forest falling
Because my roots never took to ground. I am prone to uprooting myself– there is an inherent urge to move crawling under my skin, limbsthirsty for solid ground;
My roots tangled up somewhere between Chesapeake Bay and the muddy Rio Grande; over-watered in Georgia’s swamp lands.
And Northern Ontario’s long, harsh winters see so much time for roots to freeze– this ground is frozen-hard long into spring.
But then maybe I was never a tree never flowering dogwood, dancing in the breeze or strong pinon pine, stretching to the sky, nor wizened oak or mighty maple-tree.
The truth is I never identified with constant perennial things. I never thought of myself as everlasting;
I always wished to be a bird and my patterns of coming and going, like migration, supported that: I am notorious for leaving.
I am prone to preening: prettying up like peacock, but more like a rock dove: hardy/hearty (but not much to look at).
Recently, I’ve preened so much my feathers have begun to fall out and fail my wish for flight
(though there are those that could fly, and instead use their battered feet: like a roadrunner in the desert light)
But at least my tangled roots and faulty feathers have proven to be a fine nest — built for two —
Daughters, who are still trying to spread their wings like their mother would like to do;
Daughters, who plant flowers with their every blessed step;
Daughters, who have taught me that I was never meant to be a tree, but maybe that’s where my home was meant to be.
Maxine L. Peseke is a writer, mother, and sometimes freelance editor. She is currently living in a small Northern Ontario town, transplanted from New Mexico respectively (and most recently) where she originally met each of Saturday’s Sirens as part of the Albuquerque poetry community.
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