Quinn
By Melissa Crandall
It’s never easy, to see
the small white coffin on its pedestal; the flowers.
Eyes skitter elsewhere, looking for something larger.
Something ordinary.Delicate scrollwork fluted like sugar icing.
Is it wood or marble, this pristine coffer
(suddenly the word makes sense)
built to hold a child
the small white coffin on its pedestal; the flowers.
Eyes skitter elsewhere, looking for something larger.
Something ordinary.Delicate scrollwork fluted like sugar icing.
Is it wood or marble, this pristine coffer
(suddenly the word makes sense)
built to hold a child
Weighing twelve ounces
(same as a soup can, bit more than a hamster
or the average human heart),
with a footprint the size of a postage stamp,
tiny fingers of sea anemone,
and seed-pearl toes?
Nine and one-half inches heel to crown.
(I measure with a ruler to see, to know.)
This family loses babies
like others lose coins.
If we hunt, will we find them
hidden deep in the sofa cushions?
Melissa Crandall's willingness to write where the Muse demands has allowed her to work in fiction, nonfiction, essay, and poetry. Her book Elephant Speak: A Devoted Keeper's Life Among the Herd (Ooligan Press, 2020) is the story of thirty-year elephant keeper veteran Roger Henneous. Crandall’s work has appeared in Wild Musette, Journal of the Elephant Managers Association, Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, Chicken Soup for the Soul, Allegory online magazine, and others. A native of Upstate New York, she now lives in Ohio.