by Jennifer Woodworth

1. The Fight is Fair

Draw a feeling from me or from what’s left of me, from what’s missing from me, what’s wrong with me by surplus or absence, or drawn from my reason for wishing I were strong enough to have another fight with God, or pulled like a coin from the mouth of the single fish on a line pouring a thin light-stream of water back into the sea to pay for me and thee; or drawn from all the lovely things you have that I don’t and vice versa. The single fish is pulled from the water on a barbless hook, and every mother will know that at least the fight was fair.

2. The Fight is Not Fair

Easy to vibrate at the frequency of loneliness or loss or at the frequency of the voice of the child who doesn’t need you as much, though your work is to light up in her presence forever, you never mean to be sad at her leaving it’s who she must be—the wavelength of love grown up, children grown and moved away. Now the child sleeps far from spoons and one day, you see there is nothing to tie you to the things you made together because that’s what she needed from you, and it is easy to vibrate at multiples of that frequency. You could make a stringed instrument whose intonation continually weeps at the amplitude of a child’s silence traveling through the vacuum of space, like light, though only your children’s children will make the instrument sing.

Jennifer Woodworth studied creative writing at Old Dominion University. She is the author of the chapbook, How I Kiss Her Turning Head, published by Monkey Puzzle Press. Her stories and poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from Bending Genres Journal, The Eastern Iowa Review, *82 Review, The Inflectionist Review, and The Raw Art Review, among others. She knows how lucky she is anytime she gets to write.
Twitter @fishclamor; Blog at fishclamor.com