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Julie Marie Wade

Portrait of the Sister as Phantom Limb

How she was, at once, always in attendance & always lost,
answering to different names—Kelly, Alexis, Jennifer, Jane—
evoking strangely contradictory dispositions.

—                                                 ♦

We had trained her well; she became whoever we needed her
to be, the ballast for me & for my bloody knees, my
Allegory of the Hardy Weed.

—                                                 ♦

In families like ours, there were always two kids—
the way tables came equipped with pepper & salt,
the way coffee was served with sugar & cream.

—                                                 ♦

These children arrived, symmetrical accessories:
one for each parent’s lap & the bucket backseats
of the family sedan in the neighborhood caravan.

—                                                 ♦

I saw her then as someone lucky, she who had
colored over the blueprints of her birth, evading acne &
embarrassment & the decade’s pandemic of at-home Ogilvie perms.

—                                                 ♦

I mourned her also, missing witness to a crime, the chalk
outline of her fragile body-shadow crouching behind mine:
desperate accomplice in biding our mutual time.

—                                                 ♦

Sometimes still, the sight of disheveled cushions or a partial
glass of wine reminds me of this figure I never see but feel;
her prolific absence following me, from the orphaning of adolescence,

—                                                 ♦

through the galleries of acquiescence, to the Family Portrait,
where I stand alone with the strangers who raised me—their crucible,
their cornerstone: begrudging bearer of their weighty, singular world.

——                                               ♦♦♦

 

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Vol. 43, No. 1

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Rosalie Moffett

Writer’s Notebook—Hysterosalpingography

Rosalie Moffett

Many of the poems I’ve been writing lately are trying to figure out how to think about the future, how to reasonably hope, and what we must be resigned to. How can you imagine the future when the present is so slippery, so ready to dissolve?

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