By Rachel Ventress
Honorable Mention, Poetry, Create | Encounter 2023
Specters of birth ties broken
shimmer as glossy reflections
in pools of brown eyes
Shadows of repudiated biology
in delicate, tapering fingers
remind me
she is theirs before mine
An unnatural severing
A lost limb or amputated nose
that somehow made us–the lucky—
whole
and left her and them
fractured
with a gaping, perpetual hole
A small scratch compared to
her first mother’s loss,
the weeping wound of second-best mother
I suffer again and again
as long as I carry her not of my womb
but of my love
Bone of my heart
Flesh of my soul
A bond explained only by the mystery
of deep loss in waves of grief
and this beauty made
from fusing and grafting
ashes
of the star-flung meteor
of separation and destruction
that is adoption
Artist Statement:
Since my personal experience with adoption, I've realized that adoption only exists because something is not as it should be; adoption is born of great loss. Children should be with their birth families except in the most exceptional cases. Most infant adoption in the U.S. is coercive and unethical. I don't "recommend" adoption; in fact, I would encourage people to do everything they can to avoid supporting adoption and instead to support families and women in crisis. I also see the beauty in adoption in desperate situations and cases, but I will never stop being sad that my daughter's best option for survival was not her biological family.
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