Waiting for my Daughter’s Baby, Week 36
In Ljubljana, half asleep, Kate listens to the heartbeat
of Matej curled beside her on the mattress in the heavy orb
of her belly, like a swollen seed inside a gourd. Head down,
he’s pressed against the round door to the passageway
out into the loud and glaring air. But now he knows only
the red dark, the muffled thump of his mother’s metronome,
the liquid shushing around and in him, her rumble tune
as she speaks quietly to the darker, deeper voice nearby—
whales under the sea, sending their enigmatic songs
across the miles. Here in California, half asleep, I am
receiving the sound waves from her heart, made once
of my very cells, blood and tissue, imagining his little song
his knee and knuckle dance when he presses his way down,
the pink opening effaces, and they begin his inexorable journey.
Gail Entrekin taught college English/Creative Writing for twenty-five years and has published five books of poetry. Her poems have been widely published, and she was the recipient of the Western States Award and Women’s National Book Association Prize. She was a finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize and Frontier Open Prize, and her manuscript, Love in a Dark Time, was a finalist for both the Blue Light Prize and the Richard Snyder Prize in 2020. Poetry Editor of Hip Pocket Press, she edits the online journal Canary.
