Volume 16:1, Winter 2015
Sonnet Issue
Black Schist
When I saw the emptiness of that screen
its blackness not pulsing, no life or breath in it,
I fell backward into someone elses body.
The doctor said he saw nothing but membranes,
that sometimes the baby does not grow.
When I heard those words, I knew the place in me
where you had been had already begun turning to stone
that sand and mud and water would compress
layer by layer over time, into a type of rock
that does not seem to erode, even as rain
and wind may scrape across its face.
I gather in your absence every day,
your tiny flakes of grain splitting so close
to the cast of what they will become.
Susan Bucci Mockler's work has appeared in Poet Lore, Crab Orchard Review, The Northern Virginia Review, The Delmarva Review, The Cortland Review, and the anthology My Cruel Invention. Her chapbook, Noisy Souls, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2010. She was a finalist in the 2016 Moving Words contest, is a poet in the Arlington County school system, and teaches writing and literature at a local universities. She lives in Arlington, VA.