or any year, really

1999

It was a year in which sadness fulfilled the Socialist ideal
and was given to everyone. Of little there is never shortage.
The news featured our neighbors, as if agony lacked

a local representative, and friends came over
in all their casualty with pictures of sadness
in billfolds beside their babes.

Meanwhile our mothers tried sorrow on for size, like a casket,
and I who might have had your new year's child, gave birth
to blood. A hoard of emotion opened, gradual as shrapnel,

the wall grieved down my thighs and still
born in the drench -- after such sadness
what resolution? -- the beginning.


Christina Davis