by Lauren Erin O’Brien
swollen with why. I think of
conquering an empty crate
when I made it a small rowboat,
I was alone that morning,
the taste of sickness. She too
but screaming. I did not know
resentment and this child, who
breathes through her arms. She
rejects us and our family flesh,
screams, the need to feel and hear
when she was a hatchling, body
of peaches. How she laughed
kicking her feet at its skin.
high-fevered, mouth wet with
alone, breathing low in her crib
when her mother left, only
now has no real laughter and
has many mothers, none hers,
this I understand. The painful
pounding heartbeats of a mother.
Lauren Erin O’Brien is from Massachusetts. She recently graduated from the Stonecoast MFA program at the University of Southern Maine where she concentrated in hybrid and experimental writing. Lauren was the recipient of the 2018 Goldenberg Prize for Fiction from Bellevue Literary Review and was a finalist for both the 2018 Crazyhorse Fiction Prize and Glimmer Train Short Story Award for New Writers. “After She Reads the Court Records” is her first poetry publication.
Twitter: @lauren__erin