By Mary Jo Firth Gillet

Before the suck and stutter of the first breath, even
before the first cells hook up for an amniotic float in
if not primordial bliss then something just this side of it,
there was the want, the desire that begat the pre-child
then stuck in a world impossible to remember, impossible
not to feel sorrow mixed with joy over my newborn’s
eviction from her Eden, her tenderest of faultless flesh
now to know the endless hunger, the deep cold of alone,
the body a riot of wants, wants unto the last gasp
of my mother’s four-foot-nine-inch fierce frame, every inch
railing railing against the bait-and-switch trickster’s scythe,
her only wish the hunger for more days, more life, and so
someone from hospice calls me to come get this inconvenient,
angry woman who will not go gentle into that good night.

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Mary Jo Firth Gillett’s collection, Soluble Fish, won Crab Orchard Review’s First Book Award and she has published four award-winning chapbooks, most recently Dance Like a Flame. Poems have appeared in Southern Review, Bayou, Dunes, Southern Poetry Review, Harvard Review, Florida Review, Salamander, Verse Daily, and elsewhere. She won a Kresge Fellowship in the Literary Arts and has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her MFA is from Vermont College.