By Jill Michelle

Selected as winner of the 2023 NORward Prize for Poetry by a panel of previous poetry contributors

We speed down the expressway in funeral-thick silence
miles increasing between us

and the hospital, its doctors and nurses
our son, his too tiny body.

Lost in a one-way argument with a god
I can’t quite believe in anymore

flinging how-could-you, how-could-you-nots
at the windshield’s low-slung clouds

I don’t hear my husband ask at first
Where would you like to go?

and when it registers, picture the baby
things, waiting on our dresser at home

that rubber ducky hat I couldn’t resist
the stack of bunny onesies, Christmas presents.

Anywhere but there, I think but ask instead
How about the Starbucks drive-thru by work?

And that is how I end up a grenade
at the intersection of MetroWest and Kirkman

biting my pin of a tongue
while Neil slides into the straight lane

instead of the more efficient left-turn one.
We toddle past the corner BP, take a left

at the tire shop, another left onto a feeder street
where I see what I wouldn’t have

if we’d gone my way—
Meaghan, the Comp. II student from Valencia

the one who’d answered the icebreaker question
one thing she’d do on her last day on Earth

Kiss my son’s ultrasound picture,
tell him, I’ll see him soon.

There in the Starbucks window
where I didn’t know she worked

was the only woman I knew who’d lost her baby
after twenty weeks

who knew without me saying a word
wrapped me in her arms on sight

and while it was far from the miracle we wanted
it was the one we got.

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