Missing Parts

Photo by Felipe Simo on Unsplash

Recall why the idea of you (or me) came about 
in the first place?  Man and woman on a tear with scrolls 
in four hands: big plans on how to improve on one another.

Indeed, my two wait breathlessly by the Aegean until 
I shudder forth from Penelope’s womb.    

Then they almost disappear.                    And because few 
answered for much in my day and nothing belongs to my 
mother, as usual there was little to account for. 

Was it one or both of them who went missing, and does that matter? 
Who’s to say who felt the most-worst about leaving. Active or passive, 

it’s a homeless journey                  any way you tell it.

BIO: Katherine Soniat's eighth collection of poems—Polishing the Glass Storm—will be published by LSU Press in 2022. Bright Stranger was published in 2016 by that same press. The Goodbye Animals was awarded the 2014 Turtle Island Chapbook Award. A Shared Life won the Iowa Poetry Prize and The Swing Girl (LSU Press) was selected as Best Collection of 2011 by the North Carolina Poetry Council. Her poems have appeared in the Denver Quarterly, Women's Review of Books, Iowa Review, Poetry, Superstition Review, and The Nation, among others. Visit her at http://www.katherinesoniat.com

(c) 2021 Katherine Soniat