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by Heather Carnaghan
I wish I believed in genies, in fairy godmothers and Jesus. What a beautifully comforting thought it would be to picture you warm, eyes glistening, cooing in the laps of angels and rising from your ash, a gold feathered phoenix. I don’t need three wishes or a thousand prayers of intercession. I have only one desire that matters and no spirit can grant it.
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by Heather Carnaghan
I whispered your name to the same trees that already knew it well. They wept acorn tears and clung to their last leaves defiantly remembering the spring as I angrily failed to find the words that could conjure the sound of your last heartbeat. I told each squirrel to relay my love should they find you in the wood. One stared curiously at me and, for one lingering moment, we shared the thought of you. I released a stone inked with “two months” onto the undisturbed silt below the surface of the lake. It’s tiny engraved fox will soon be covered with ice and, like your hiccups, only I will ever know it was there. by Heather Carnaghan
Missing you is a physical ache deep in my chest; It’s a heaviness that bends my spine and burdens every step. Is there something deeper, truer than “I love you” that a mother can tell her child? I love the smell of the forest. I love the taste of a raspberry plucked sun-warm from my grandfather’s garden. But you, you are a need in my soul that “I love you” can’t explain. What words hold in them every breath I breathe? by Heather Carnaghan
There it is, the look of recognition the scan of my body and the moment she takes in my shrinking waistline. She gleefully asks, “Did you have the baby?” Timidly, I squeak out “Yes” My nod is too emphatic; it raises alarm in her eyes, She was born, but “No”, my head sways left and right, less adamantly more confused She never came home with me that day Her eyebrow raises and I doubt my answer Should she count less than babies who do? My head bobbles, my gut contracts. My limbs itch to run or fight. I race to the nearest locking door so I can catch my breath before the next “How many children do you have?” “Where’s the baby?” or “We’re expecting!” by Heather Carnaghan
It is no religious miracle nor medical marvel that I have survived for one month with a piece of my heart forever gone. It is a feat of strength borrowed from friends and carried by you. In my weakest hours and ugliest of times, when I had nothing to return, you held my hand and whispered, “I love you”. by Heather Carnaghan
Your chocolate brown crib so carefully assembled and covered in the softest bedding has a flowing ruffle below. A mint colored blanket stitched with love still sits folded in anticipation. Your name is painted in cheerful script behind a delicate paper mobile hung to make you smile as you gaze up at it. All it does is make me long to know the color of your sleeping eyes. Hazel? Green? Or chocolate brown like Daddy’s? by Heather Carnaghan
All of the broken promises of this beautiful and awful date are heavy in a place in my heart where, now exists only stolen hope. Who I was and who you would have been died that day and left me with all of the parts of motherhood that the drug of a newborn’s smell subdues. How cruel it seems that I also have this love that is so deep that I will take all of these awful things if they are all I am meant to have of you. by Heather Carnaghan
My heart has lodged itself deep in my stomach, wreaking havoc on other vital organs. My throat is full, choked by words I cannot find and a howl I cannot let escape. Grief is clawing at my soul A fierce and frightening beast that haunts my dreams and lurks in the shadows of every waking moment. Fear surrounds me, filling places it never touched before, of returning to life of mothering as a ghost, of all the “nevers” and “withouts”. by Heather Carnaghan
A hole so vast and so deep that the dropped stone never makes the telltale “thunk” as it collides with earth. An emptiness, infinite like space. expanding, ever larger the longer it exists. It sucks the air from my lungs and swallows every possibility. Into the blackness go her lips and her eyes her kisses and the things she would see her tiny fingers and all they might have held her perfect feet and all of the places we should have gone together. by Heather Carnaghan
The day you were born still and silent my heart was shattered into fragments so sharp that they pierced through my whole life and opened wounds that will never heal. I held your tiny hand and stroked your chubby cheeks. they grew cold as my own warmth seeped out of you and the corpse color crept over your perfect toes. by Heather Carnaghan
Crumpled tissues sit bedside, wet with twenty seven hours of sweat and tears so salty they’ve left crystalline tracks on my cheeks The glasses I’d never before removed for fear of missing a moment are strewn, one leg splayed their lenses fogged with bloody fingerprints and organic remnants of the moment I wished I had been blind to. I scan the room, wild eyed, trying to find the source of that horrible noise. It assaults my ears and pastes a look of horror on my husbands ragged face. A wail so deep and terrible that it hails from a primitive part of the psyche that has no words for this pain. The audience stands, hesitantly at first, wringing their hands and covering their mouths as they realize what I am searching for. The sorrowful ovation faces me and at last the source is clear. by Heather Carnaghan
My car flew dangerously around the bend as I fled my cookie cutter neighborhood where wildlife has been neatly replaced by concrete and a community pool. She dove into the road, as unexpected as my frenzied midnight journey. Tires screeched, tattooing the fresh tar, but she sat, still and stoic, staring with holographic eyes, unafraid. I stared back, distractedly thinking how unlike a real fox the toys I’d bought for Charlotte were. She was beautiful, fiercely so, like loving her might rip the heart right out of your chest. Her fiery tail flicked impatiently as she bored with our encounter and let me pass. I didn’t recognize the gift that she left me: a permanent symbol of a life that wouldn’t last. by Heather Carnaghan
She stopped kicking. Just like that her elbows and knees paused their nine month assault on my organs. I drank honey to coax her to dance and ice water, was that a shiver...? My swollen belly was leaden, heavy with the death my heart made me blind to see. I drove on with hope, a phone, and three car seats in the back seat of my tiny Hyundai Accent. by Heather Carnaghan
“It’s just a heartbeat scan” I told him and my words turned his car around. They echoed through the next two months and left him forever wondering if her heart would still be beating if he’d continued south on 95. by Heather Carnaghan
Love is a strong word for a binder but this binder was a work of art a type A educator’s titillating dream. Deliciously color coded, it held coveted secrets to my daily doings learned over thirteen years of attendance and parent conferences, of messy inquiry and messier class pets. That binder held in it the blueprint for a substitute, that stranger to my surrogate children, to assume my teacher identity fully and competently for an entire quarter, (A lifetime to an 8th grader). It was just enough time for me to grow a wriggling newborn into a rolling three month old. I was ready for her. by Heather Carnaghan
I like Lucy. Charlie Brown’s friend, is it? They’re not friends, But anyway. It’s short like Jack and Sam’s. Biff is short. We’re not naming her Biff. Aoife? It’s Irish like you and smooth like Kerrygold. “Ee-fah”? That’s a life sentence, not a name. No one can say Aoife. Amelia is… ...the air hostess? The pilot, you dolt! A strong namesake. A Doctor Who companion, really. What else is on that list? Charlotte. C-h-a-r-l-o-t-t-e ? Yeah. Charlotte. Jack, Sam, and Charlotte. Well? Charlotte. by Heather Carnaghan
Some women loath the girth of their newly pregnant bodies. Not me. I loved my curves. Full and round, I strutted, head high, in dresses so tight that they hugged my hips and showed your kicks. Those kicks were our secret, you hid most from daddy, but I knew you through them. The tiny elbows in my ribcage were a constant love song that grew stronger over our nine month romance. The rhythms and harmonies, those eager heartbeats and hiccups, sang of firsts steps and parades, of treasure hunts and birthday cakes. When the scan turned you from it to a she the key changed somehow. Our song was of tea parties and scraped knees, of adventures and girl scouts. A sweet refrain played in my head of touching my daughter’s confidently clothed belly, swollen with a lovesong of her own. Heather Carnaghan
I smile at the newborn’s first coos and the delicious softness of her peach fuzz hair against my cheek. I am drunk on the smell of sweet, sour milk and so much life to live. Your hair was fine. A single lock was spared by the nurses before your perfect puckered mouth and round cheeks were turned to ash. My consolation prize was taped to ugly paper with an uninspired border that was haphazardly off-center. Why does she get a lifetime of smoothing sleep-dampened hair and frilly bows but I am left with 37 taped strands and a tear-stained box of cinders? I didn’t spill a single tear on her pink and wriggling infant. I saved them all for the desperate ride home camouflaging jagged, jealous thoughts and raw eyes behind unnecessary sunglasses. Heather Carnaghan
These woods are full of death of fallen oaks and ungrown seeds, those miscarriages of the earth. Decaying trunks one hundred rings thick are strewn across the mossy floor. I sit on ancestors and wonder how many have fallen before. Does the Earth mourn the crushed sapling or the masticated seed? Does her molten core break like mine when blight strikes the new growth? Could my single tear be the definitive drop a thirsty leaf needs to weather the desolate winter? Heather Carnahan
“You’re so strong!” they exclaim and I thank them for the awkward compliment that only I seem to know is a lie. I was pieced back together hastily and none of the cracked stones of that perfect arch fit back into their places snuggly anymore. My keystone is gone. Heather Carnaghan
You are the negative space in every picture, absent, black and empty against the bright whites of their toothy grins and colorful vitality. You are the quiet reflection in the rogue moments between my meticulous words, the sharp intake of air after pregnant pauses and faraway stares. You are the deliberation behind each breath as I dubiously opt to go on breathing. Heather Carnaghan
Grief is thick and heavy. It is tree sap, stubbornly stuck to my hands no matter how hard I scrub or what chemicals I employ. It sticks to the fibers of the rest of my life and ruins each with its sticky blackness. Perhaps if I face it head on, tap it, boil away the teary wetness, some sugaring will take place and I will find purpose in my child’s death and live again like in the beautiful before. Heather Carnaghan
"Without you" is a quicksand, deep and unforgiving. The more I struggle against its slurping grasp, the more mercilessly it pulls me downward. I will never step out of it, but when I stop resisting I float to the surface of my grief where I can still feel the sun on my face. Heather Carnaghan
The blinding, slashing rain of this wretched storm will pass and in its wake new growth will rise up from seeds I never knew I planted. |
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August 2018
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