All Your Life You’ve Carried Around Your Own Hit Package

by Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick

You’ll miss the moth that thumbed between 
your window, at twenty, & its silk-spun  
morse code for yearning. But there it is,  
the expanse between it-could-be & it-already-  

has-been. Your babe’s outgrown the swaddle.  
Your mother stopped trying to know you &  
there’s no coffin filled with sparrows  
at the end. It’s an uneasy profile, grief.

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Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick's work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Gulf Coast Journal, Salamander Magazine, The Texas Observer, The Missouri Review, Four Way Review, Solstice Literary Magazine, and Passages North, among others. Hardwick serves as the Editor-in-Chief for The Boiler Journal.