Sestina for My Daughter
Mikaela Hagen
Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest 2023 (view all the winners)
First Prize, Margaret Reid Prize, Traditional Verse
Illustration by Robin Larisch
Wet with slap-startled tears, my lips began to count
the days that would map to months (nine). Forty weeks
of steady incline. My poppyseed maybe-baby would deliver
emetic rumbles as we climbed. Back when it was still
just us, I slept curled around her. Eyes squeezed against light,
the dark drifting up, breath and navel pulling down.
But pregnancy becomes a summer porch—you set down
an empty chair for every body who cares to recount
their own stretching and swelling. They promised me light
halfway down the tunnel (am I the tunnel?). A few more weeks,
they said, and your mouth will stop sweating. You'll still
be pregnant (they accidentally lied), but you'll be delivered
from the nausea, secured toward that special delivery.
Decadent cheeks, luminous eyelids, stardust downy
brows, those stoopguests sang me a newborn that I can still
half hear. I hummed her as I nervously prepared. Counting
happy endings, pinning them on the line. Stacking weekly
reassurances alongside the woodpile. Quilting their lightness
into a bedspread to cover us both as the autumn light
left early. Then Oh! So consoled, how could I deliver
the news that on a food/fear full Thanksgiving twenty weeks
along, something vicious wrapped its jealous coils down
below my ribs and squeezed. That I shuddered and counted
the watery throbs, wild-eyed wondering if she could still
be all right. Pulses and vessels tangled, beating/beaten I still
felt her. Have you noticed that birth is always painted in light?
Artists, priests, witches evoke it with a halo-glow. No accounting
of the shadows. No mention of the silent, starless deliveries.
We drove fast and frightened over the edge of the holidays, down-
town to a darkened hospital, hibernated for that post-dinner week
that shuffles toward December. Parked the car under a weakly
shivering streetlamp and tumbled into a waiting room so still
I wondered if I was under water. I ran my grasping fingers down
my swollen abdomen counting "one. two. three?" The light
contractions would bring her out, but they would not deliver
her. I knew it was finished but I couldn't stop counting.
I delivered her late that night, without the protection of weeks
we had promised. She was light as a fading memory, still
as sundown. Now and never—infinite and uncounted.
