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Disappearaphernalia 3
Mom, I know it would have been your first question, your main concern, so I just want to say that I’m fine.
That’s what the doctor said, I’m well enough to return home where I’m resting and recuperating on my own,
here where the windows are painted shut and the air from the hallway smells like garlic and old cigarettes,
here where the neighbors upstairs stomp at all hours. I’m fine. Of course we both know how much that
leaves unsaid. I wish so much that I could say we’re both fine and that he’s here inside of me,
still growing strong and filling with potential, but there aren’t two of us here, there’s just me.
As empty as that feels, I believe it is as it should be. Even as I lay here in bed writing,
believing, realizing again how, inside, I’m without him, the solitude seems befitting.
And though I would never want to harm your memory, it is better that you’re not here,
knowing well your desperate weakness for the lost and for the losers. And for once
I’m glad his father’s not here. Especially if he was proud, if he’d ever had it
in him to be truly proud, that would be unbearable, just another heart for me
to have to break. Yes, my heart is broken, as is my womb, and only the one
will time repair. Knowing now that he will be my only one,
I regret all the more that he did not stay with me for long and that
I never was able to see him. It’s as if he just passed through me on his way to somewhere else.
Even now I can feel him out there moving onward, still alive like nothing has changed, still
departing, and only his shadow still under my wing. Me, here, lying on the platform with
my eyes open wide to see him, my hands open wide to catch him, writing and believing.
I’m fine, Mom, but I still feel like I’m having a baby.
Brent Holt was aged, like many wines both fine and middling, in the Willamette Valley of Oregon,
then spent some years in distillation in and around Szeged, Hungary, and is now on the rack in Minneapolis,
MN. He is a father at home and a subordinate in the offices of a social services agency.
"Disappearaphernalia 3" is the 3rd part of a triptych whose theme is things that vanish.
Email: Brent Holt
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