Poetry
A Perfect Love
by Olivia Hajioff
by Olivia Hajioff
Long ago, I had a baby cousin in another land.
She spoke—not one word did we have in common, yet there was nothing we did not understand. She would sit upon my lap for hours. I can still feel her pudgy arms wrapped around my neck, rubbery, taut like a balloon. How safe I felt. Maybe you know too, how little words matter when the eyes, the tone, tell all. My mother, a teen, cared for her mother, a baby, many years before. Did something pass down to us, I wonder? And when I left, a gorge of grief came. The gorge now just a tiny drawstring sack open now, and spilling but mostly tied and tucked away. My baby cousin is thirty now. Here and not here. How can that be? |