Walter

Refrigerator Winter

by sara wheeler

Caiden

by caroline padgett

“Do you have any children?” She asks. I pause, my intestines curl back on themselves reaching for my throat. I can taste the chili I had for lunch hours ago. I swallow down the left over sorrow.

“No.” And another piece of your memory floats down the Davidson River like the grey grit and white bone of your ashes, those too, I can taste.

Time stretches like the marks you left me, the constant tick tock of burdened memory that you did, in fact, Exist.

The Nurse with sterile eyes, rushed feet, tries to take you from me. But my instincts know skin to skin, warm flesh to flesh; this is what is good for babies. Even the ones that are blue, like you.

My chest aches, my Breasts swollen full of milk to nourish a still, small body who will not need it.

Ice packs placed bound tight, suffocating my fertile body trying to convince nature Winter has arrived,

Too soon.

We laughed in our secret language written on pink walls that translate into spirals of DNA that made you real.

You had my nose, your father’s feet. Blood to Blood Mother to Son.

“Do you have any children?” He asks. “No,” I say again; it’s easier that way. And a piece of me shrivels, and drowns with you.

Untitled

by cathryn b. campbell