In the Dream My Mother Comes to Me Having Just Lost a Child
We stood at the water's edge.
We seemed happy or terrified.
When the burning dies down,
my mother said, I become a
surveyor, a house punctured by
drunks stuck in amber. I tied a
yellow ribbon around her neck.
Her spine silverfished. I recall
the dream as I stare into a bowl
of milk this morning, smelling
limestone. My daughter says
she woke to a woman crying
outside her window. That
woman was me.
Elizabeth Hardwick's work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Magma Poetry, Gulf Coast Journal, The Texas Observer, The Missouri Review, Four Way Review, Harpur Palate, Sixth Finch, and Passages North, among others.