Naming our daughter
By Lee Potts
January 15, 2023
January 15, 2023
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We named our last daughter the morning
of the caesarean section we scheduled in the fall when leaves were turning to smoke behind every house on our block. She was named as we waited to allow our baby to slip up into air and light through a wound. Almost like she was being rescued from a well. We tried out each name on paper and with our tongues and teeth, checking for its heft, for its edge. We looked for any drag it might add to her flight. Her name would be different now if labor had started early and there was no time for us together in that quiet unfamiliar room while the sun came up and unnamed constellations faded into the cold, clear sky. |
Lee Potts, author of the chapbook And Drought Will Follow, is poetry editor at Barren Magazine. He is a 2022 Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee. His work has appeared in The Night Heron Barks, Rust + Moth, Whale Road Review, UCity Review, Firmament, Moist Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. He lives just outside of Philadelphia.