AFTER THE MISCARRIAGE

We went out to sit in the car
—snow coming down—
just to get out of the house.

I lowered the window sometimes
to stop the snow
from sealing us in.

———

The lights were still on
in those rooms where our daughter,
barely three, kept moving,
shifting her things.

———

How many days—
weeks—did we leave her
in that lit-up silence?

———

Back inside,
we let our footprints
melt on the floor.

She ran and hugged us
each entirely, as though

we’d come home after curfew
to this devoted,
oblivious parent.

--Wayne Miller

Copyright © 2017 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

PHILOMELA

Dear nightingale hiding in green thickets,
I don’t want to think of the girl

who couldn’t tell her story, how nothing she sang 
said what happened to her, her voice smudged

like wet ink the left hand blurs as it writes. 
Well, worse than that—the knife at her throat,

the whole dark alley of him, errant star
burning inside her, then burning her out,

the red of her, the words. Her tale
like no tapestry you’d hang on the wall.

But the sweetness of your song, Bird,
it tears at the heart, as if hidden deep

in every family there’s a story like this.
So in ours.

There was a man who couldn’t sleep nights
hearing your song outside his window.

Long before his daughters ever told,
he tore himself into an endless tremor. 

He’d sputter and cough, choke on his food
and seem to deserve the more pity for that. 

What is a story but a nest, and what is a nest
but a vessel made for breakage and flight?

Those girls were not made for the story
they had to tell. But tell it they did.

Out of such troubled bodies, a shattered song,
out of the thicket, pouring forth.

--Betsy Sholl

Copyright © 2017 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.

ARIADNE AT THE NAXOS APARTMENT COMPLEX, 10 AM

If I call this a garden,
it’s a garden. It’s a marbled affair—

the a/c units dripping green-black rivers,

the residue of last night’s rain
sitting in a cheap cherub’s eye

while an imbalanced neighbor in a sunhat
tends sweetly to her basil.

If I call this the antithesis of alone, it is—

the ticking of his father’s wind-up watch,
the flash of beer cans
lined irregularly on the counter

as I step outside into the rays
as if I was born heliotropic.

This day is proof
that there is a sundial
for every single decision throughout history,

and a garden is a garden
once you name it,
once you call it
by its Christian name.

I don’t expect you to fall for my logic. I don’t fall
for anyone’s. I am here with him
because I want evidence.

Except the light is blind this morning
like a child at a funeral,

asking, What are we all standing here for?

--Analicia Sotelo

Copyright © 2017 by Oberlin College. May not be reproduced without permission.