If my son had stayed dead,
I would not have written the poem
where my husband wailed my name
and I ran outside, to find him holding
our baby whose skin was as blue
as his eyes, as blue as the sky, as blue as
the shirt he wore that day. The poem
where I grabbed my son
and laid him on the deck and began
to compress his sternum with the heel
of one hand, pausing only to breathe
into the icebox of his lips and there was
nothing, nothing, nothing—
until he coughed and vomited
and finally cried.
If my son had stayed dead,
I would not have written the poem
about the taste of grief that stained
my mouth that summer, how I felt
as though I were chewing grass and dirt
and stone. Where I wrote
that even though my son was alive,
somewhere, in the space behind my eyes,
he was still dead, because I saw his body
every minute of every hour of every day
that July and August.
If my son had stayed dead,
I could not have written the poems
that came after about all the ways a person
could die, or not die. Or describe the dread
we wore like surgical gowns when the bodies
began to stack like firewood, that first summer
of fear. If my son had stayed dead,
I would not have written the poem.
I could not have written.
I would not.
Rachel Mallalieu is an emergency physician and mother of five. She writes poetry in her spare time. Rachel is the author of the chapbook A History of Resurrection (Alien Buddha Press 2022). Some of her recent work is featured in Chestnut Review, Superstition Review, Whale Road Review and Rattle. More of her poetry can be found at rachel-mallalieu.com.
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