Anniversary

As my father became thinner,
ALS whittling his body to something we didn’t recognize,
the weight my mother carried grew.
As though each lost pound
was added to her grief. I watched her way out
in the waves, where I couldn’t swim, and I wondered
how she kept from drowning. On lunch breaks
I called from the Wall Street public space,
surrounded by indoor palm trees and strangers, crying,
tucking myself around the bulk of my 30-week pregnancy.

Death was a current dragging
my family out to sea. If you kicked your legs down,
you went under. I remember, it was June, it was sunny
and warm, the rainier cherries were like jewels
on the fruit carts. She said to me,
I understand caregiver suicide.

Red Shift

I am dizzy with space; I let the Earth
rumble through my bones. Everything
is moving at an alarming rate—
me and the rock we all
travel on. Time
is beyond escape.
The rumble grows
stronger. My body is the chamber
of a cello that echoes
our expanding Universe.

My daughter
and this disease have left
their own echoes on my body—
a softer middle, a palpitating heart,
the cramps like water that move
through my uterus. Even as cosmic
microwave radiation moves
through all of us. There are ways
to see it—these glowing moments
that, even as you read,
get bigger and farther away.

Emily Hockaday’s Emily Hockaday’s first full-length collection, Naming the Ghost, will be out with Cornerstone Press in November 2022. She is the author of five poetry chapbooks, most recently Beach Vocabulary out from Red Bird Chaps March 2022. Her poems have appeared in print and online journals, as well as with the Poets of Queens and Parks & Points’ Wayfindinganthologies. Emily is the recipient of a New York City Artists Corps grant, a Café Royal Cultural Foundation grant, and the winner of the Middle House Review Editors’ Prize. You can find Emily on the web at www.emilyhockaday.com or @E_Hockaday, and on Twitter: @E_Hockaday; and Instagram: @emilyaltahockaday