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Launching
by J. C. Todd
She watches him launch it.
Petey, with his skipper
cap, his new toy boat, adjusts
the sails, angles the rudder
till they’re just right
for a light breeze. Cast off!
When the boat wallows, tips,
sails drenched with silver
dragging it under,
he’s running, her son,
to the other side, shouting,
I’ll bring you in.
What she, a grown woman,
a mother, couldn’t do,
somehow bring in
or get over to where
her lilac-blue girl
floats in a limbo
like this pool, shallow,
in some lonely marsh
down-hill from heaven.
Lilac-blue. She saw her.
Surfacing from twilight
sleep to rage and great
confusion. Sister Paul
hissing, You said
abort, no heartbeat.
Sister Luke pleading, Please,
let’s baptize it,
while she’s thinking, Breathe,
breathe in deep,
to the baby who flops
in the doctor’s hand, who mews
in air when she’s slapped,
whose ribs scarcely move,
ribs that luffed like sails
when light air lapses
and wave wash stills
and the outbound ship’s
adrift.
PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED:
The Western Journal of Medicine, 1994.
Nightshade. Pine Press, 1995, 2000.
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Bio: J. C. Todd’s poems and translations have appeared in the anthology Shade 2004,
and in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard
Review and other journals. Pine Press published two chapbooks: Nightshade (1995) and Entering
Pisces (1985).
Awards include a fellowship in poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, two awards for poetry from
the Leeway Foundation, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts international artist exchange fellowship to
the Schloss Wiepersdorf colony in Germany, a scholarship to The Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators
in Sweden, and a stipend from the Latvian Cultural Capital Foundation. Her poems have received five Pushcart
Prize nominations.
She is an associate editor for the poetry web magazine, The Drunken Boat
(www.thedrunkenboat.com), where she
has edited special features on contemporary Lithuanian and Latvian poetry in translation, and she was guest
poetry editor for the Summer, 2005 issue of The Bucks County Review, and co-editor of “Recurrence
in Another Tongue: Poets Translating Poets” that appeared in Frigate 4 in 2003.
A lecturer in Creative Writing and in the Writing for College program at Bryn Mawr College, she has an MFA
from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
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