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jeannine hall gailey

In a Plague Year, a Glass Baby Grows Inside

During the plague year, I plant so many things:
 
walls of herbs, extravagant dahlias, a hummingbird garden.
 
Without any touch at all, an immaculate conception:
 
a glass baby grows inside me. All the scans attest.
 
A miracle child, delicate as sugar or snow.
 
It’s not your imagination. It’s not God visiting
 
you, not your Magnificat. It’s just, you had time
 
on your hands and so much energy. You planted
 
so much a flower bloomed inside you.
 
It could have been a tumor, a shadow, a misread.
 
At any rate, I hope by the end of the Plague Year
 
I will give birth to a magic baby, one so fragile
 
she cannot be touched. She’ll glisten in the sunlight.
 
She deserves a castle surrounded by a high rose bramble.
 
In a Plague Year, we are all having babies. We sing them
 
songs in the night to quiet their voices.
 
You see, my baby may be imaginary. All the ultrasounds
 
come back inconclusive. I wrap myself in eyelash sweaters
 
and fuzzy pink blankets. You never know what the end
 
of a plague will bring. First the bloom of spring,
 
then death, or angels, or a chrysalis baby, born
 
in a peach, bamboo shoot or a sweetpea, a magic blessing,
 
a baby that rides a butterfly and sips from a thimble.
 
The end won’t be so hard, now. The shuttering of light,
 
the long cold nights. Remember I’ve been planted.
 
Planting. Planed. All that’s left is a miracle.
November / December 2022

Barbara Daniels
Jeannine Hall Gailey is a poet with Multiple Sclerosis who served as the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington. She's the author of six books of poetry: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World, Unexplained Fevers, The Robot Scientist’s Daughter, Field Guide to the End of the World, winner of the Moon City Press Book Prize and the Elgin Award, and the upcoming Flare, Corona from BOA Editions. She has a B.S. in Biology and M.A. in English from the University of Cincinnati and an MFA from Pacific University. Her work appeared in journals like The American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. Find her at Twitter and Instagram: @webbish6.
Art: Cat in Living Room. Oil on canvas. T. Aguilera. 
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