Wherever I May Find You

by Carol Sadtler

 
You groan as you roll in the bed tonight. Our long bones align,
parallel, yet impossibly connected; how we turn and turn 
in that paradox.
 
I remember the man in a Wisconsin campground, who tried to make sense
of us—two tall women in a pup tent. “What are you? A couple of…
schoolteachers?”
 
I remember two chicory coffees, two beignets, lying side by side
one New Orleans morning when we wished two daughters 
into being; 
 
I remember the lines in my father’s forehead, creased in contradiction: 
“You’re working women; who’s going to take care 
of your children?” 
 
I remember so many years of filling out forms that never fit
our family, crossing out father writing mother
twice; 
 
I remember crossing a continent to find a place that would marry
us, choosing whose name fits the line labeled groom
at the registry;
 
I remember that your sister’s spine fractured with the slightest 
strain, and how the metal pins in my mother’s hips glowed 
in her x-rays;
 
In my dream, our bones shatter; fragments
laid in the ground to dissolve and mingle
in earth, in air.


* * * * *

"Wherever I May Find You" was first published in The Tishman Review.

Carol Sadtler is a writer and editor who receives her best ideas on, in or near the water. Her poems and reviews have appeared in One Art, The Humanist, Bangalore Review, Sky Island Journal, Big City Lit, The Inflectionist, Writers Resist, RHINO, Pacific Review and other publications. She lives in Chicago with her family.