Poetry

A Perfect Love
​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?