Amy Lowell Prize Finalist, selected by Laura Rodley
Stephanie Angelini is a writer, performer, artist and small business owner living north of Boston. She spontaneously started writing poetry while in business school one day and never stopped. This poem is from her in-progress first collection, birth and death in new england, about falling in love, getting married, covid, George Floyd, musicals, having miscarriages, having kids, her dead baby sisters, Kenya and the Salem Witch Trials.
She has been published in FUSION Magazine, Funicular, Ascent, Third Wednesday, the Journal of American Poetry, Mom Egg Review, Brittle Star, and featured by the Beverly Main Streets Sidewalk Poetry Project and the Improbable Places Poetry Tour.
Her work is part of the permanent installation of the Ducktown Poetry Walk at the Noyes Museum of Art of Stockton University in Atlantic City.
She has been unable to get her hair to do this again.
nighttime in the neonatal
I can see the rise and fall of his chest
I watch it like the nurses
in his glass bassinet he is snow white, sleeping beauty, a land faraway
he stretches out under the heat lamp, arms over his head, like he is on a Hawaiian beach, like the one we went to on our honeymoon
it is hard to imagine now he wasn’t there
it is hard to imagine he is here
in this place
I can hold his whole hand, with one finger
I can pick him up sometimes
I didn’t notice until I noticed
the team of doctors, paired off by specialty, residents, nurses, each moving, doing, looking frowning in concentration over the top of their masks
their goggles, scrub caps
they had multiplied, from somewhere, around him in the middle of the night, their eyes and hands moving independently, in opposing directions, as if each moved from the shadows by a team of puppeteers
one nurse had funny novelty socks
dyed hair with pompoms, like 90’s Britney Spears
so much experience in her five ten self
it gladdened me, it frightened me, that they had sent the best
she was holding pressure on the bleeding
our son was bleeding
very slowly, all day and all night
okay mom, give him a kiss
they are taking him downstairs for emergency surgery
it is one am or two am
but they are ready
the newborn anesthesiologist and his resident, assured me, they are ready
I am not ready
I haven’t moved
they are looking at me
I know what they are asking
I know why
I want to say it
I want to say I love you
in case I love you
is goodbye
but I can’t
I must not cry
I pull down my mask
he is completely covered in plastic, like an albatross resting on the Pacific trash island, exhausted from the journey
I watch his perfect breathing, the rising and falling of his chest, like the gentle rocking in the middle of the ocean
I cannot find a place to kiss him
only his feet are uncovered
I kiss each
they are smaller than the width of my whole mouth
his big toe, his biggest toe, is nothing, his body’s punctuation
a question only he knows
they take him
I have been awake two days
I fall where I stand