The Child Puts Apples into the Mouth of the Tree by Claire Wahmanholm

After we lost the child, a hole appeared between your lungs. At first it was the size of a gasp, an apple, a fist. Then it widened into the size of a plate, a small face. We had read about this sort of thing happening: after a bad grief, the heart goes bad and turns on the body, sucking everything into it like a spillway. Look, you said one day. You put your hand to the edge of the hole and the tips of your fingers vanished. You put your hand in up to your wrist and pulled back the emptiest fist. I was in the middle of dying, but I pulled myself from the dirt and bent before your chest and looked. Instead of the mesh of your body, instead of the room behind you, I saw a black meadow. Warm wind breathing against my skin. I hadn’t thought there would be wind. I hadn’t thought there would be anything. That night I dreamed of our child in that black meadow, dropping apples into the hollow of a dead tree. Her hands put apple after apple into the mouth of the tree and came back whole. So it was possible. I could feel her breath on each apple as she held it toward me. The meadow rippled with it. When I woke up I reached out in the dark to make sure you hadn’t disappeared without me. When you do, I want you to take my hand.

Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Wilder, winner of the 2018 Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry (forthcoming from Milkweed Editions this November). Her work has appeared in DIAGRAM, the Journal, PANK, Bennington Review, the Kenyon Review Online, New Poetry from the Midwest 2017, and elsewhere. She lives in the Twin Cities.