Tectonic Shift
Downy, soft, fragile newborn skull, a dandelion
waving on its slender stem. No support, poor
support. Hold her head, they caution, cradle
her neck they command. Her heartbeat is visible
through her fontanel, the top of her head—
should that be so pronounced? Her cranial sutures
stand out when she cries, red faced, open
mouthed, distress howl, and you see that her head
is barely held together, five bones and their
unjoined sutures: sagittal, lambdoid, coronal,
metopic. Bone against bone, spreading apart,
overlapping, expanding again, they make room
for growth, unlike the hard adult cranium. Four
arbitrarily named seams on the grid of a head
guard the brain. Some days I slip—my sutures slip
and the parts that were so securely fastened
inside, so integrated, peek out and speak. Just
when you’d think my dandelion would be
a redwood, my fontanel is soft, unexpectedly
fragile. My sutures unhinge, unable to contain
their contents, to lock them in. I thought I was
finished, I protest. I thought I was done. But these
sutures will not join, they will not agree
to house the prison of all my selves
Catherine Klatzker’s poems have appeared in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine, Please See Me Journal, Silver Birch Press, and Split This Rock. Her prose has been published in The Forge Literary Magazine, Atticus Review, and other journals and anthologies. Her essay for Tiferet: A Journal of Spiritual Literature won their 2014 nonfiction prize. She has published one mental health memoir, You Will Never Be Normal (Stillhouse Press, 2021). She lives among stacks of books with her husband in California.
