Poem by Ellen McGrath Smith
On Repeat
As she got older, she gathered more bass
in her voice, as though life’s harder hits
had instructed it to sound less hopeful,
less joyful, less girl. By early adolescence,
her Yes sounded just like her No to me,
and I had to ask again just to confirm
what she’d meant. Another gift, I guess,
from the god of hearing loss, wrapped
in a gauze of unknowing, erasing the shape
of her intentions—giving her, on repeat,
the chance to change her mind, whatever
it was. Giving me the chance to wait
a little longer for her verdict. My child,
my judge, her mountain-range sentences.
Art Information
- “The Embrace” © Helen Burke; used by permission.
Ellen McGrath Smith teaches at the University of Pittsburgh. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times, American Poetry Review, Los Angeles Review, Quiddity, Cimarron, and in several anthologies, including Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability. Her second chapbook, Scatter, Feed, was published by Seven Kitchens Press in 2014, and her book, Nobody's Jackknife, was published in 2015 by the West End Press.
For more information, visit Ellen McGrath's website or follow her @breezely1462 on Twitter.
