by Siobhan Casey

HER HAND: THE BRIDGE

Isolation becomes a way of life, normalized
over days, months, years.
The rifts between you and him, her and them,
become slot canyons or countries
that shift, borderless
and fractured.

The cards you intend to send remain ink stains
on your fingertips. You stop reaching
your hands into the void of family,
stop sifting through the junk mail,
listening for the phone line where you were once called daughter.

Now that it is spring you wake
with the intention
of planting wild
fields of aster, marigold, California poppy, and coneflower.

You balance a pack along the weedy trails
in search of seeds, the smallest answers
for where you went wrong.
You climb Otter Cliffs barefoot
and step through the brine and mass of crab legs.
You sweat and row the boat of sleep until you arrive
home again.

As it turns out, a small field grew
in the shaded wood while you were away.
Someone has strung lights on the porch
and made a place for the baby to be born
on the darkest day of the year, her hand in yours
the bridge that glows for miles.

SIOBHAN CASEY earned her MFA in poetry from Chatham University in 2011 where she worked as an editor on the Fourth River literary magazine. Her chapbook, Three Fourths of a Dream, was published in 2016. Her work has appeared in Black Fox Literary Magazine, Stoneboat Literary Journal, Up The Staircase Quarterly, and Mud Season. She completed a degree in Inclusive Elementary Education this fall and currently lives with her family in Pittsburgh, PA. When she isn’t writing she loves to bicycle or walk along the rivers with her toddler and their zany dog, Bok Choy.