I don’t need to tell you what the rain says,
why the moon shrinks, how the indigo clouds hang
so low and heavy that people under umbrellas stoop
to avoid the fog.

I sit at the kitchen table and read
Condition of Baby Delivered
After Mother Shot in Terror Attack
Deteriorates

Somewhere, a woman holds a baby in her arms.
She’s attached to drip poles and oxygen monitors,
the sheet pulled around her room is a peculiar shade
of turquoise. A man sits on the side of her bed,
the two of them look down at the smallest baby
they’ve ever seen: translucent skin, dolphin nose,
eyelids stretched blue, the mossy touch of ear-hair.

I don’t need to tell you why I find myself
touching the low scars of my stomach,
returning to that memory—
steel and ice—I heard the rhythm
of the skin as it sliced, the murmurs, the silence,
and then the cry behind the blue screen—all blue—
everything I heard was blue and I drank the blue
like air touching my tongue for the first time.

I don’t need to remind you how we murmur
blessings graveside, whisper
may you know no more sorrow.

Only the rain knows
how my hands can be both full
and empty. Only the rain knows
how a spared body
can house a broken heart.