28,065 Nights
I tell your stories to keep myself alive. I tell you new stories. I speak them aloud to you when no one is around, the way you used to talk to Grandpa in your bedroom after his death. They play on repeat in my head. I write them down. I tell them to Elliott when he asks. A year later, he still remembers you, but I don’t know how long his memories from two will last. To him, you will be more story than person. Are we always more story than person, words thicker than water? I got the wave of your hair and your lack of wisdom teeth. I did not get your metabolism that let you eat six hot dogs at one cookout, but I get to keep that story, more necessary now than blood or breath.
Week by Week
At
this
time your
offspring is
invisible. Now
a speck, the dream of seed and root.
Baby is a dime, quarter, increasing in value—
golf ball, gerbil, your own palm—then more sports equipment: soft ball, football,
racquetball court.
By this point your baby is a train, a field, a city, an ocean. This week baby is the
sky. Now a hemisphere. Now a blurry world.
Art Information
- “Floating Baby” © Catriona Ward; Creative Commons license.
Katie Manning is the author of three poetry chapbooks, including The Gospel of the Bleeding Woman (Point Loma Press, 2013). She has received the Nassau Review Author Award for Poetry, and her writing has been published in Fairy Tale Review, New Letters, Poet Lore, So to Speak, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.
She is the founding Editor-in-Chief of Whale Road Review and an assistant professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. Find her online at Katie Manning’s website.
Katie will read the two poems here and others at TW's panel “Wild Equations: A Math Poetry Reading” for the AWP 2016 conference in Los Angeles.
“28,065 Nights” was originally published in Nonbinary Review, September 2015. “Week by Week” was published in Thrush Poetry Journal, March 2012.
