What's Still Right in the World

Autography 4

During this time people protested. I didn't though I never for one moment was for it. And people bought supplies and became political but I didn't though I never for one moment doubted these necessities. A poet acquaintance had a baby. I saw her and the baby—they'd just been at a protest—and felt like I'd never had a baby despite my two boys. I stopped reading newspapers except about science and stopped the TV news though poets were at protests and writing blogs and someone asked me how I could write such abstract lyrics at a time like this and I looked at him and wondered what it felt like to write a poem. Pregnant women looked freakish to me, like costumes or experiments. On my way to the day care I looked at the big bellied women or new mothers with strollers and wondered what was it like to push a baby out of your body. Last night as I gathered my little son out of the bath into a green towel—clean, smooth, slippery, sleepy—I wondered what that was like.


--Rachel Zucker