It generated a poem
in the style and voice

of me. It could never feel
or smell that peeled

orange. It has no soul.
Someone else had to

tell it a watermelon’s
weight is like

a newborn. It never touched
a dog’s muzzle that lifted

like a chef trained
in France. It never felt
 
the ground with its own
lacy openings like latent

grief. It never heard
a ventilator

screaming. It never wrapped
and carried an injured rabbit.

It never had a mother
die. It never had a father

die. It never grinned,
never thinned from grief,

nor remembered
what it was like

to angle that straw.
It is incapable of hoping

for a meadow.
It is unconcerned

with the forest. I am
in the corner of the

living. I won’t outsource
the water lilies

that pulled my father
into the painting’s pond,

his morphine pump
loosening. I won’t outsource  

how I watered
the plants of a friend
 
after my dog died
of seizures,

just so I could
save something.

Reader, would you ever
feign suffering?

The silent
tint of sundown,

how my father said
the robins should have left

by now, which was his way of saying
he would die in two weeks.
 
I can still see his orange
scarf flapping like a caught

bird. Can it tell me
which of these birds

is my mother?
Nature teaches
 
every day, swans
that are banking on

the warming water.
I’m breathless

as the sonnet
that took my father back

to the ocean, the sonnet
that keeps my mother

alive. I’m breathless
with knowing I am still

that small child
locked in a room

making books,
who in school refused to

dissect a pig. She would not
touch its small, pale heart.

—Janine Certo

Poet’s Website

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