I’ve written the most poems about you.
Every birthday, another poem. You’ve no idea. I’ve never let you
read them. You’ve never asked is what I tell myself
but the truth is you’ve no idea they exist and for this I am grateful.
So many things I will never tell you. The way I sat in the kitchen the afternoon
I told your father I was pregnant. The way light paused in the window frame
as if to ask, “May I come inside?” How small the world suddenly seemed
once I knew you were not yet in it. Your laugh is the most.
Its whirligig echo in the hallway reaches me even now.
Some nights I wake in the small hours of the morning, the light fragile as only light can be
just before the sun’s rise. I think of you finding these poems. I think of one day,
say 40 years from now, how I will be gone and surely your curiosity will win out.
You will sit at the small white desk where I wrote and you will open my laptop.
You will clear your throat. And just there, after opening the folder labeled with your name
your finger will land on its prize. It will be this poem. It is called, “The Night Before Your 16th Birthday I Cry in the Upstairs Bathroom so You Can’t Hear Me.” I think you will choose this poem based on its title,
because you think how sad I must have been watching you grow, year after year
your strong vine inching further away from me.
You never knew the working title was “I Love You #16.” Well, now you know. I wasn’t sad.
I was full. So full I had to spill outside myself.
Moment after moment.