Editors’ Choice Award: Shannon K. Winston
Shannon K. Winston’s book, The Girl Who Talked to Paintings (Glass Lyre Press), was published in 2021. Her individual poems have appeared in Bracken, Cider Press Review, On the Seawall, RHINO Poetry, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers and lives with her partner and dog in Bloomington, IN. Find her here: https://shannonkwinston.com.
To the Child I Imagined Adopting Before Quarantine
Any chance you heard it, too?
The Spanish quartet that played
Puccini’s “Chrysanthemums”
to an opera house of plants
during the pandemic?
Perhaps, you too pressed
your fingers up to the computer
screen to feel the rustle
of evergreens and lavender
in their velvet seats.
The cello’s butter-smooth notes
meandered through our empty house.
For years, I wondered where
you would have slept
or if you would have snored
and if so, how often and when;
your other mother beside me,
nudging us both into silence.
At first, we would not speak
the same language:
your gestures not intuitive,
together we would learn.
You’d open your mouth
as if to whisper your secrets
into my armpit, your left cheek
nestled into my collarbone.
But in March 2020,
I pushed the world away–
kept everything
at a six-foot distance.
I scrubbed down the apples
and oranges we bought at the store,
and left the mail outside for days.
I couldn’t care about anything else.
Occasionally, while doing laundry,
I glimpsed my bathing suit
at the back of my dresser drawer
that smelled faintly
of the salt pools in Florida
where I had swum just months before.
How I had dreamed of teaching
you the breaststroke, of showing you
how to hold your breath
and somersault to infinity.
When our neighbor played piano
through our lonely walls,
I thought of you.
I hoped you weren’t adrift,
that you had someone to sing to you–
someone just inches away.
I scrubbed down the apples
and oranges we bought at the store,
and left the mail outside for days.
I couldn’t care about anything else.
Occasionally, while doing laundry,
I glimpsed my bathing suit
at the back of my dresser drawer
that smelled faintly
of the salt pools in Florida
where I had swum just months before.
How I had dreamed of teaching
you the breaststroke, of showing you
how to hold your breath
and somersault to infinity.
When our neighbor played piano
through our lonely walls,
I thought of you.
I hoped you weren’t adrift,
that you had someone to sing to you–
someone just inches away.
