After Life and In Between
When you ask again if I believe in ghosts,
insisting I commit, I answer with
a vision my cousin had two summers ago
in Canyonlands. She was beaten
by a prisoner on work-release, her voice disabled,
drifting out, when our grandmother—
sixteen years gone—appeared above her. Solid
as the trees. Without an ounce of tenderness
our grandmother said Get up, girl. My cousin
does not remember crawling to the road
but a minivan found her stretched across
its lane. A family wrong-turned
in an unmarked branch of the park. The driver
used my cousin’s walkie to guide the helicopter,
and she woke from the coma
saying our grandmother’s name.
While you half-listen, I can see you arranging
your argument. The steely pearl
of your intellect. But my love,
you have never lain bleeding on any ground.
And there are things I knew
before I knew you. Which is why
I never told you what happened last spring
while the dogwoods bloomed,
a few nights after some god’s hand fished inside me
for the heart that was growing there
and plucked it out. In grief
I opened my eyes to a little girl, four or five,
standing quietly beside our bed. She held my hand.
If I thought you would listen, I would tell you
she was almost ours. That before she
vanished, she told me her name.
Christina Stoddard is the author of HIVE, which won the 2015 Brittingham Prize in Poetry (University of Wisconsin Press) and was a finalist for the 2016 Washington State Book Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Pleiades, Crab Orchard Review, Tupelo Quarterly, storySouth, and Spoon River Poetry Review. Christina is an Associate Editor at Tupelo Quarterly and Managing Editor/Publicist at The Account: A Journal of Poetry, Prose, and Thought. She lives in Nashville, TN where she is the managing editor of an economics journal. Learn more at www.christinastoddard.com.