Here for It All

For JAM

We are at a picnic, the week after we have both gone to funerals, 
fought lice, scrambled to make lunch with just the heel of the loaf, nothing 

left but the crunchy kind of peanut butter. I am mostly not crying as we watch 
our children running barefoot. It’s too much, too much, I say. I’m in my head

and drowning. Who can fight existentialism and do dishes at the same time? 
She says, well, we have come to the place in our lives where life and death are 

messy and present—the jagged edges of absences sitting next to us, 
their shape and gravity recognized, heavy enough to pull tides of salt sea 

in our bodies. We are at the place in our lives where our ghosts have names 
our fears are hard like the ground at the end of a fall, soft like flesh 

with its owner gone missing in the night, as we caress what is left, begging
our memory to trap this sensation, this touch, this goodbye as faithfully as our first 

kiss. But our body will not, cannot, remember this, so we will let 
our muscles imagine all we need our grief to be: emptiness in infinite particulars.  

We have come to the place where we know a hole is a thing all its own.  
We hold what it is and not what we’ve lost. We try to hold each other but 

our fears—now hard, now soft—scuttle over our feet each night when we should 
be sleeping. Superstition laughs and says someone, someone has just walked over 

your grave. Oh, momma, oh child. At the end of the singing, we light sparklers 
and hold them to the sky. That night my son asks for dessert and I give it to him

because he is here and hungry and can eat and I can hold him
an extra ten minutes before bed as the ice cream melts over us.

Whose Side Are You On?

If you grow rhubarb in the dark
it will be sweeter;
the strings of their stalks will 

soften, bend, the whole
becoming red,
redder, flushing bright

in comparison
to ordinary farming
in the sunlight, things planted once.

No, to make this violent abortifacient 
tame, you let it grow two years
then move it to total darkness

where the roots tangle so closely
you can hear them squeaking
as they grow past each other,

shoving through dirt—
the stretch of their stalks will
pop, crack, creak, the rub

of growth and seeking
for what we have hidden:
the light, of course, I mean

the light.

SHANA ROSS

Shana Ross bought her first computer working the graveyard shift in a wind chime factory, and now pays her bills as a leadership expert. Her work has appeared in Apeiron Review, Chautauqua Journal, Ruminate, Bowery Gothic, Writers Resist, and more. A 2019 MVICW Parent-Writer Fellow, she edits for Luna Station Quarterly.