All in by Barbara Crooker
by Barbara Crooker
"What doesn’t / in time enter Grief’s lexicon?"
Danusha Laméris, “Glass”
The first time seeing a new doctor, one of the standard
questions is always How many children do you have? The one
I don’t know how to answer. The naked truth: four,
but one died seems like a blunt instrument, but three
feels like a lie. She notices that my pressure is up,
says she’ll come back for another reading, leaves me
beached in the cold white room. Adrift on an iceberg,
I remember how young I was, how nothing in the Lamaze
books prepared me for the nurse unable to find a heartbeat,
the doctor pretending there was nothing wrong. Until he couldn’t
anymore. What I was like afterwards: an empty shell. And
there were more questions: boy or girl? asked the cheerful
checkout girl at the local grocery; her bafflement when I
abandoned a week’s worth of groceries, unable to stutter
out an answer. And where is she now, my sweet
firstborn, the one I never held, never even got to see?
She swam inside the ocean of my body for nine short
months, safe and warm, but I failed to deliver her to the sandy
shore. Oh, my little starfish, I see you floating in the dark
night sky. Now I count my breaths, and a nurse returns, says
I’m back to normal. Which is, of course, impossible,
in this world without her in it.
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Barbara Crooker is author of ten full-length books of poetry, including Some Glad Morning (Pitt Poetry Series), longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press; The Book of Kells, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea; and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and more.
by Barbara Crooker
I have painted it big enough so that others will see what I see.
-Georgia O’Keeffe
A fraction of an inch each day, through the long fall and winter,
this amaryllis bulb encased in wax—no water, no soil—has clawed
its way towards the light. You have been in the hospital since October—
heart attack, stroke, your aorta coming apart—inching your way back.
This smidge of green hope has kept me going. Some days, it didn’t seem
there was any movement, that the sun, in its shroud of clouds,
was not strong enough to coax some growth. I can only talk to you
on the phone; some days, a handful of minutes
is all that you can summon. This phone is so heavy. But now
the cluster of buds on the tip of the stalk begins to open, splits,
cleaves into six parts. Slowly, you gain strength, shuffling
with a walker, climbing four stairs, spooning blended food with your
shaking left hand, the right one clenched in a claw. Returning
in the smallest of increments. Soon each sepal will unfurl its flame,
flagrant as O’Keeffe’s painting, a radiant speaking in tongues.
I did not think you’d come back to me, but here you are, and here
is this flower: a trumpet fanfare, a red convertible, the molten sun.
Our little lives, so brief. But oh, the bloom.
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Barbara Crooker is a poetry editor for Italian Americana and author of nine books; Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, is the latest. Her awards include the Best Book of Poetry 2018 from Poetry by the Sea, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowships. Her work appears in a variety of anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature.
