The Paddock Review

Birthmark   

   

We talk of cleaning the rugs, under    

the rugs, and suddenly   

I enter into another childhood   

like the cat I dropped off in the town   

where I was born   

one hour from home.   

I have found my way here.    

I know the face of the strange woman   

who gave birth to me in St. Anthony’s.   

I don’t know this blue house   

but remember our eyes, their right angles,    

each a tidy room with torn-screen centers:   

and her dyed blonde hair   

curling tightly like a daughter’s fist   

about her mother’s finger.   

….

This poem is from the chapbook Lost & Found by Joann Deiudicibus (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/lost-found-by-joann-deiudicibus/

Lost & Found maps a path back to the self through blood and chosen families, scouring the body for answers to grief and blurred memory. These poems ask, who are we if we don’t have a history, and how can we become despite what’s kept in darkness, left unsaid? As a meditation on what we have to lose in finding ourselves, and what’s left to be saved if we can love with resilience, the poems in this debut chapbook consider ways home, all that is at once lost and found.