Small Griefs

by Nancy Naomi Carlson

In the woods on the other side
of your chain link fence where does
and fawns paw at the frozen dusk
and a lone fox slinks across a clearing
on the prowl for something vulnerable
and small, even so, these bed sheets
won’t stay buried: the satin ones clotted
with blood from the eight-week life
your cervix would not hold; the teal ones
draping your chest where they cut the lump
from your breast—
                         your own cells, like termites,
boring through hidden ducts, bound to gorge
on your blood and gnaw at your bones;
the layette ones—so pale against bluing skin—
wound tight around your newborn son
when they ferried him from the birthing room
to machines that purred breath,
until his lungs rejected even this purified air.
So many sheets—
                   even the worn-out wedding ones—
layered like the silent snow that beds
the tracks of the deer, the fox, and my own
clumsy footprints wandering the dark,
that cannot hide the body’s betrayals
piling up faster, year after year,
though you sacrifice parts of yourself
to keep the peace, but the body,
imperfect coffer, refuses its charge.

 

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Nancy Naomi Carlson has received two literature translation fellowships from the NEA, and her translations have been finalists for the BTBA and the CLMP Firecracker Awards. She is a poet, translator, essayist, and translation editor for On the Seawall, and has authored twelve titles (eight translated). An Infusion of Violets (Seagull, 2019) was named “New & Noteworthy” by the New York Times, and her translation of Mauritian writer Khal Torabully’s Cargo Hold of Stars: Coolitude was published by Seagull Books in February 2021. Her co-edited anthology, 101 Jewish Poems for the Third Millennium (Ashland Poetry Press), was also published this year, as well as her translation of Congolese Alain Mabanckou’s As Long As Trees Take Root in the Earth (Seagull). An interview of her as a poet-translator appeared in AWP’s Writer’s Chronicle (February, 2021).