Threnody

By Elisabeth Murawski

Issue 34 • Fall 2016 • Poetry

SECOND PLACE POETRY IN THE 2016 SUMMER CONTEST

I love this poem for its willingness, no, its commitment, to not look away. Such is
the most trying yet necessary work of seeing as an artist. This poem sees, and sees
through itself, us. – Ocean Vuong

It all comes back when her waters break:

Mama yowling like a cat. The pinkish shape

in the bowl. The shout don’t flush

even as she grips the silver handle, a doll-

like figure whirling round and down

to where the water goes. Yells

in a panic to the labor nurse: don’t let me

kill the baby! Resolves to tell

her mother what she did. Here

they are together, days later; Mama’s

picking at a hangnail till it bleeds.

Murder? That’s absurd. The fetus

died inside me. The doctor said to save it

in the bowl. I told you not to flush…

you disobeyed. The daughter groans.

Years of nightmares, children drowning.

I try to save them, but I can’t. Mama

eye rolls her disdain: you don’t

explain miscarriage to a three-year-old.

The daughter looks down at her shoes.

In a voice soft as kidskin, asks

will the dreams stop now? Will the children

still drown? The memory stands

between them, dripping and pink.

Elisabeth Murawski

Elisabeth Murawski is the author of Zorba’s Daughter, winner of the 2010 May Swenson Poetry Award, Moon and Mercury, and two chapbooks: Troubled by an Angel and Out-patients. Hawthornden fellow, 2008. Publications include The Yale Review, The Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, et al. Currently residing in Alexandria, VA, in her heart she has never left the “city of the big shoulders” where she was born and raised.