Elizabeth Cranford Garcia

Post-hysterectomy Dream, 1959

for Doris
 
You slip through my arms
like a bar of soap, a slick colt
just burst from her mother
still membraned, a yolk
 
tumbles over the shell, you fall
into fire and flame up,
shrivel to a raisin
i pull you out, whole and plump
 
now you are dirty, you need a bath
where is a basin
where is a bowl
where is the water to clean my baby
 
you are asleep on a slab
of marble, a stone cherub
where is a towel
where is a blanket for my baby
 
outside, a lake in the road,
there is mama and papa
there is your dad
here is our baby, my baby
 
where is the boat to get across
how will i swim and hold you
i will sink in the water and choke
how can i leave you
 
i won’t
i won’t
 


Elizabeth Cranford Garcia received the 2022 Banyan Poetry Prize and the 2021 Byron Herbert Reece prize from the Georgia Poetry Society. Her most recent work is slated for Tar River Poetry, Portland Review, CALYX, Chautauqua, and Tinderbox Poetry, and has recently appeared in Anti-Heroin Chic, Prometheus Unbound, and Mom Egg Review, and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. She is the author of Stunt Double and serves as the current poetry editor for Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. Read more of her work at elizabethcgarcia.wordpress.com.