[Realpoetik] Nadia Herman Colburn

[RealPoetik Magazine]

STORY





I don't know what made me do it. It was like getting up late at night and
going out to find the moon, hung full, at the end of the block. Framed,
between the low row of houses. As if it had been there, waiting, all the
time.



When I came back inside, there was my life, enormous about me. It hung, as
in a story, and then started to shrink. A girl with pigtails came into the
room and reached up and grabbed the thing like the moon and started swaying
with it back and forth, tossing it up and down.



I lay down, letting the page turn, for choice. Letting the light come up, as
a decision. When I woke, you were there, at the head-end of the crib, still
in your blankets. A small form. Your breath like someone escaping, then
being caught.



As if this time it will be different. Up in the sky, intact. A small
stranger opening her arms. Letting the thin silver slip through into the
blank before the hands can clasp. Or, in the undergrowth, the little
squirrels, or in the dark burrows, beneath the house.




*Nadia Herman Colburn* lives in Cambridge, MA where she teaches literature
at MIT. Her poetry has appeared in many places including *The New Yorker*, *
Conjunctions*, *American Poetry Review* and *Slate*. She is currently
working on a meditative memoir about pregnancy, motherhood, social
responsibility and art, pieces of which are forthcoming in the *Southwest
Review* and *Literary Imagination*.


-- 
RealPoetik
realpoetik.blogspot.com
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