what will I do until then?
buy seven white nectarines at the farmer’s market, eat one each day,
do this over and over as the nectarines become pears, the pears become
winter, the leaves will turn to eggshells underfoot, and I won’t
remember what it was like to live in a green world
are you also a child in this way? I mean dropping so heavily
into each season, it feels infinite in all directions
time like a puddle, like the cuffs of the sweater I wore to the beach
in September, believing I wouldn’t need to touch the ocean
what do I want now? a slap to the inner thigh
hard enough to bring me back into my body
groceries, and the energy to use them to make something
beautiful for myself and someone else, and the someone else
once, I held onto everything so hard I’d have to
command my fingers slack at bedtime
a still frame of my life in this moment reveals
I am as sad as ever, and loving so quietly
Mia Sitterson
Mia Sitterson (she/her) is a postpartum doula and dancer moving and grooving in Washington, DC. Her poetry finds roots in her queer, Jewish, Cuban-American body. She was selected as a featured writer for Khora Magazine, where she published “postpartum: three poems” and was a finalist for the ONLY POEMS Leonard Cohen Poetry Prize. For the last six years, she has run a biweekly queer poetry group out of her living room. Over two hundred people have written poems in this space.
