by Theresa Burns

according to a segment on Radiolab today.
And not for days or weeks, says the biologist to the host,
but decades. Until my own death.

They’re not sure what you’re doing there—
if you shield me from the worst diseases
or lead me to them faster. But you’re there,
the irritant if not the pearl of you.

Somewhere in my liver, the lobes of my lungs—
you, aborted in my 20s,
still hang around. Maybe in the warp
of my fingers from arthritis. Or maybe they’d swerve
worse without you.
Your dad is there, too—a man I haven’t seen
in half a lifetime, who I’ll also never lose.

And you, unfortunate half-moon, who settled
in my fallopian when I was 37.
Wrong place, wrong time—is there any doubt you’re my spawn?
I nearly bled out in an ambulance before I knew
you existed.
To know you’ve been there all this time,
and I’ve missed it.

Have you met your siblings, the two who survived?
You’d like them, I think.
They’re the murmur in my heart that keeps me up at night.
And the calm that comes down
like a blanket on me.

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Theresa Burns is the author of the poetry collections Design (Terrapin Books, 2022) and Two Train Town (Finishing Line Press, 2017). Her poetry, reviews, and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, New Ohio Review, Verse Daily, Plume, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2023 New Jersey Poet's Prize, Burns is the founder of the community reading series Watershed Literary Events and teaches writing in and around New York.

by Theresa Burns

Sometimes I wanted to crawl into a cave myself
when I watched the unfortunate baboons
palming their mangos at the zoo across the street,
then trying for hours to lick the stick off themselves.
I felt sorry for them as I felt sorry for the birds
in their high windowless cells—what good all that
red iridescence, all that sky-pitched soar?—
but not as sorry as I felt for myself that spring.
Nineteen and alone, no dancing in boîtes along
la Huchette, no fine-boned boys walking me
back to my room where I kept a knife
and a hotplate and a penlight so I could open
the right door when I visited the bathroom late,
my hand along the wall when the timed light
timed out, the hallway that held the most amazing
smells, crêpe and sleeping animal, pissoir and coffee.

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Theresa Burns’ poetry, reviews, and nonfiction have appeared in The New York Times, Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, America Magazine, New Ohio Review, The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), The Cortland Review, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is the author of the chapbook Two Train Town (Finishing Line Press, 2017). The curator of Watershed Literary Events in New Jersey, she teaches writing in and around New York.