by Jane Hilberry

I string aprons on the windows for curtains.
I try to breathe normally.

I try to breathe normally, but the air’s
too thin. I never saw your body.

I never saw the body you left,
small as a bird in a cat’s paws.

Bird small as a leaf fallen on the grass.
I see no children that belong to me.

Whatever children belonged to me,
my body’s a reservoir, evaporating.

The reservoir of my body evaporates.
Possums snuffle in the yard at dusk.

Shapes move through the night yard.
I string aprons on the windows for curtains.

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Jane Hilberry taught Creativity classes and Creative Writing workshops at Colorado College for 35 years until her recent retirement. She also led arts-based leadership courses for executives at The Banff Centre in Canada. Her books of poems include Still the Animals Enter and Body Painting, which won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry, as well as a chapbook co-authored with her father, Conrad Hilberry: This Awkward Art: Poems by a Father and Daughter (Mayapple Press).