By Becca J. R. Lachman

When you couldn’t hold your head up, we all sat
at the black keys, your 6-pound frame swallowed
by a nightgown. New to all this, how’d we know
exactly which intervals would hum you back into sleep
at 8, midnight, 5:25? Verses we’d shrieked or whispered
as kids surfaced, out of nowhere. For our own sanity,

            we grew our daily rituals: I love coffee, I love
            tea-eeeee, crooned into morning through
            bluetooth speakers until we had it memorized.
            Dance parties to shake off the electricity of
            worry or bliss, drowning out the refrain where
            you might really leave us. I fell again

for your foster Da then, how vast his inner library
was, finding the song to make you stop crying.
Your toothless grin was wide as your face when
the trio of us swayed. Soon, you reached toward
mouths, added rhythm at the Baldwin with
an atonal foot, moan-humming along like

            you knew, already, what breath and sound could do
            inside a body. I can believe in a God who thought up
            music, can sit down at a piano in an empty house
            and be saved by something again. I wonder what
            Japanese artists would say about our old grand,
            jagged cracks in its lid where a contractor had

a very bad day. Or about your story and ours,
no doubt too much in this house and beyond it
to lacquer completely with silver or gold.

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Becca J. R. Lachman earned her MFA from Bennington College. Her poetry collections include What I Say to this House, The Apple Speaks, and Other Acreage, and she edited A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford. Her work has been recognized by the Ohio Arts Council, Black Mountain College Museum & Arts Center, and has been published in Hunger Mountain, Rattle, and Change Seven Magazine. becca-jr-lachman.com