What Stays: A Poem that Remembers

I remember the baseball glove
I was given for my 13th birthday,
the leather smell, linseed oiled,
it held a ball for days and slept
under my pillow

I also remember playing in the dark,
fireflies in mason jars, Ollie Ollie Over –
tossing that ball high into the air
again and again, the higher the better,
the darker the better

But most of all, I remember when
my father said I was easily as good
as a boy any day of the week, as long
as I held my bat high, as long as I ran faster,
slid into home straighter, and I
never got beat up because I was good
as a boy

Because at 13, I had a famous
Sucker Punch. My mother would fret
over my eventually broken finger,
“Holy cow, young lady. that’s
your ring finger.
Now what will you do?”

The New Math

I know the takeaway:
the long
÷
divide
the idea that zero
can change, it
can change
0verything,
That you can borrow
something from
nothing and have
everything
to lose-
and that
equal
can be
less than,
I also know
what it’s like
to have nothing
left to give,
when you divide
It all up by
carrying
the one.

Finding Miguel

I know now what I could’ve done:
I could’ve braided your hair
into immutable silver strands
so I could see you again
lush and beautiful with power;

I could pull sleek chevrons
gently from your temples
and turn those into falcon wings
or into gale-force winds that
could lift you up and over
this deserted city — or I could

have dreamed a name for you
or a song to draw you away
from that course of action.
They said they found you slouched
in the closet, sad as winter, your
small chapped hands opened

to the sky as though waiting
to catch it before it finally falls.
Or were you sitting there,
waiting to see for yourself
if it was true it already had?

Denise “Dee” Sweet (Anishinaabe, White Earth) is Faculty Emerita for the UW System. Her books of poetry include Know By Heart, Songs For Discharming, Days of Obsidian, Days of Grace, and Nitaawichige. She was Wisconsin’s second Poet Laureate (2004-08) and is currently Poet Laureate in Bayfield, where she now resides. She will present “Poetry and Conversation” at 5:30pm on Monday, Oct 21, as part of the Chippewa Valley Book Festival in the Jamf Theatre at the Pablo Center in Eau Claire.