Recurrent Loss
Renee Emerson
Topography in Blue
Christen Noel Kauffman
Afterward I need a few weeks to let it all go to hell.
Dust, dishes, laundry heaping up in piles of work I won’t do.
I read a book. I think about the God to whom I applied—
another child and another child. Denied. I refold hand-me-downs
in creased and recreased stacks, plans, visions, I can’t have back.
Disorder fills the rooms of our two-story house.
Who could I have held? Why couldn’t I? This time it is winter. Light
half-gone. No one to be carried, no one to be fed.
I am awake. I go back to bed.
Renee Emerson is the author of three poetry collections, most recently Church Ladies (Fernwood Press, 2023). Her poetry has been featured in Shenandoah, Poet Lore, Dappled Things, The Rabbit Room, and other journals. She teaches online writing courses for Indiana Wesleyan University and Writing Workshops Online. Originally from Tennessee, she has lived all over the South and now makes her home in Missouri with her husband and five children. You can find her online at https://reneeemerson.substack.com/.
Christen Noel Kauffman is author of The Science of Things We Can Believe which won the 2023 Ghost Peach Press Prize in Poetry, and the chapbook Notes to a Mother God (2021). She is a 2022 National Poetry Series finalist. Her work can be found in A Harp in the Stars: An Anthology of Lyric Essays (University of Nebraska Press), Copper Nickel, Tupelo Quarterly, The Cincinnati Review, Pleiades, DIAGRAM, and Smokelong Quarterly, among others. Find Christen on Instagram and BlueSky.