Sara Michas-Martin
Expecting Again
Forty-five minutes
before you tell me the totality of the new
the good luck encased in the unluck
after so many years
you at the outset making the tiny
and it’s like
a bug got on me I don’t recognize
what is this feeling overturned
time’s rigid accordion
it was spring when we met
you with an infant crossing the street in your green dress
me pulling weeds
my son on my back
custodians in tremulous upstart
suddenly not so alone in the loop
we stumbled milk stained to city park the bakery
kitchen to kitchen and between backyards
and you
tending the garden of abstraction again
and you live streaming the blood again.
and me in another state hounding my understudy
what is this
I can’t get close enough to see
how gratitude rides on the muscular legs of grief
Sara Michas-Martin reads “Expecting Again”
Sara Michas-Martin teaches creative writing and environmental humanities at Stanford. She is the author Gray Matter, winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize and nominated for a Colorado Book Award. Her work has been supported by a Stegner fellowship, grants from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg prize, and residencies from the Vermont Studio Center, VCCA and Marble House Project. She received notable essay mentions in the Best American Nonfiction Essays and Best American Science and Nature Writing anthologies, and recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the American Poetry Review, Conduit, Kenyon Review, Poetry Northwest, Terrain.org and elsewhere.