by Tara Zafft
We are snacking on chocolate covered
cherries, we think. The label in Hebrew
obscured. Maybe it’s raisins, cured up
on soft chairs we avoid the rain. Third day
We talk about wanting to feel safe.
And they look to me. As if. Decades
older I have some answers. Do I tell
them? I have more? They wonder when
it will stop raining. When the war will
end. When they will know themselves.
When love will knock on the door.
And stay. Longer than the pregnancy.
We talk about choice. Was it the right
choice? My eyes. Wrinkled. Their eyes.
Wide. Women of different ages, I can
only touch the fringes of their lives. I hold
a piece of chocolate covered something in my hand.
It melts, I see a dried cranberry. Between
my fingers. Bitter. Sweet.
Dr. Tara W. Zafft is most recently Winner of the Moonlit Getaway Poetry Prize. She has published her work in the anthology, Rumors Secrets and Lies, Poems about Abortion, Pregnancy and Choice, Write-Haus, Aether Avenue Press, The San Diego Poetry Annual, Vita and the Woolf Literary Journal, and Dumbo Press. She has a BA in Russian Literature from UC San Diego and Ph.D. in Modern Languages from the University of Bath, UK.