I think of the way your legs sprawl across my lap, your bellybutton a map of how once I split myself in two. I remember the fibrous web of a peeled orange and how you asked me to tell you the color of sound. How I feel the finality of moving spheres, the sun burning out on the crevice of your neck. I won’t see the last time your ribcage expands into drum or that the sky is a memory suspended in blue. Daughter, there are blue whales giving birth to thick calves every year, colonies of ants building roads below our feet, their bodies plucking scraps from the skull of a dead raccoon. I twirl your hair into the rim of a cup just to drink every molecule held tight below your chin. I know there are strands I will never get to trace. How a star burns for three million years and then not, my body the shape of a crescent moon who one day forgets how to breathe.
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Christen Noel Kauffman lives in Richmond, IN, with her husband and two daughters. She holds an M.F.A. from Northern Michigan University. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Willow Springs, Booth, The Cincinnati Review, DIAGRAM, and The Normal School, among others.