by Angela Voras-Hills
My son cries each time we repot a plant, sad
to lose the pot, so we buy smaller plants
for those pots, perpetually replacing them,
establishing a microcosmic rainforest in each
sunlit room. Humidifiers running, white noise
of waves crashing through our walls, like
the sound machine they used at ocean camp
when the kids were small—the fishtank
crowded with orange slivers, shimmering
as they wriggled under the weight of their
wide, round eyes. The last day, the fish
swam circles in jam jars on a table: each kid
could take one. My daughter named hers
Katie before I got there, so I spent fifty bucks
on a tank for what I learned can’t live
in a bowl, still found it floating in a month,
not belly up or at the top, just in between.
My mom was dying then, and I wasn’t ready
to tell the kids, so I drove to Petco, where I was told
my tank was too small, inhumane, and now
Katie Two is nearly eight, and my mom
has been gone four years. When my daughter
was younger and couldn’t clear her plate, she’d beg
someone to finish her food. But it was impossible
to eat my meal and keep hers down, too, so I’d scrape
hot dogs, sandwiches into the trash and hold her,
right there on the kitchen floor, my shirt soaked
with our tears, our bodies too small to contain us.
Angela Voras-Hills's first book, Louder Birds (Pleiades Press) was awarded the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in The Sun, Kenyon Review Online, Prairie Schooner, Best New Poets, and New Ohio Review, among other journals and anthologies. She holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and has received support from Ragdale, Key West Literary Seminar, Write On Door County, and The Sustainable Arts Foundation. She lives with her family in Milwaukee, where she runs The Book Drop Reading Series.