I Was Born Too Soon After

I was born in a crowded chorus
of blizzard gusts,
combing the darkness
ten tiny fingers
(one for every day
I hung around the womb
past due).
 
I breathed in my mother’s grief,
humming through skin and limbs,
and we shared
the electricity of your ghost,
your face descending in swollen vessels
circled tunnels, deep and long,
honey thick and just as slow
moving from her heart
to mine, the one still forming.
 
And when the hospital lights
won out my leathery defiance,
I searched the room
for your face.
I found nothing
but a window of endless snow
and a vinyl floor which held up
the world, my parents,
and the weight of you,
brother, as you drifted among my cells
my blood and my bones.

Allie Schreck lives in Washington, D.C. and teaches high school English in Virginia. She has an M.A. in English from George Mason University. Currently, her favorite poems are John Berryman’s Eleven Addresses to the Lord. Her poems appear in The Wheelhouse Review and Burnside Writers Collective.