BY JOELLEN CRAFT

boat wakes weave worms a web for our car’s

flesh do I help my children

escape as they did from me

I orient an infant root through

seed coat my small

daughters orient

through bay to light

which bends to embrace which is to form

the negative space of what’s held

once I held each in the ocean two paths leading from me

we rode the waves my back to the open

clouds’ dark mysteries

on the surface’s litany

with no break for joy or grief’s

interstate stitching dirt in place

isn’t there grandeur in how small a movement can be

Joellen Craft lives on the Delmarva Peninsula with her family. Her work has recently appeared in Radar Poetry, The Penn Review, and The Collagist, who nominated her poems for a Pushcart Prize. Her chapbook THE QUARRY (2020) won L+S Press's Mid-Atlantic Chapbook Series competition. www.joellencraft.com

Process Note: I had the first half of this poem, though with longer lines and more exposition, for a few months. One day I was rereading a draft of an old poem about how grief is like an interstate, and I began working that poem into this one. In revision, the lines and caesuras tightened up so the rhythm felt like getting rolled by waves and trying to resurface between them, and the middle section emerged from the tension between that form and the earthy, destination-bound imagery of the plants and the road.