The Day After I Turn Forty, a Friend at Church Tells My Son That He Needs a Little Sister
My son says nothing. He keeps making exaggerated happy faces at our baby friend. I fake a smile. I wonder when these comments will end if not by now. I imagine telling my friend that I always think of the baby I miscarried as a girl, but I’m only that cruel in my mind, and my son is still standing here. “Certainly not!” I laugh, “But we have lots of cousins and friends!”
My son and I are delighted by our small friend Ida, her big green eyes and round cheeks. She had reached for me from my thoughtless-comment friend, and she’s refused anyone else who’s tried to take her, folding into me fast like a secret letter. My son runs off to play with other friends, and I sing “Hey Jude” to Ida beside the piano. When her dad comes to take her home and lifts her from my arms, she reaches for me again, and I hold her close. I’m not reaching for anything but this.
More Than It Hurts You
for M—
My friend shows me
his belt——worn brown leather, soft from years of use——
decay halted for cow hide,
the same belt his father wore.
He says that it only hit him recently
that this belt is also the same
belt that his father used
to hit him,
and I wonder where my dad’s belt is now, the large black belt
my siblings and I feared, but that clearly did not ever deter us
from committing the worst crimes:
I was going to list some here,
but now I can’t remember
anything we did, just the cracked air,
the gasps, the stinging years.
Now I wear a fabric belt with no buckle.
My friend tells me that his son
sometimes picks up his belt and plays with it like a toy,
that he swears
to his young child, “I will never use this belt to hit you,”
before his son could have any idea
what that would mean.
Katie Manning is the founding editor of Whale Road Review and a professor of writing at Point Loma Nazarene University. Winner of the Main Street Rag Poetry Book Award for Tasty Other, she’s the author of eight poetry collections, most recently Hereverent (Agape Editions, 2023) and How to Play (Louisiana Literature Press, 2022). Her writing has been featured on Poetry Unbound, Tangle News, Verse Daily, and many other venues. She enjoys beaches, books, board games, brownies, and alliteration. For several years when she was in high school and college, she and a friend wrote each other notes as their evil alter egos! Katie’s was Katerina. They were smack talking as rival supervillains, and it probably helped them channel some young woman rage. Find Katie (and possibly Katerina) online at katiemanningpoet.com.
