Diorama
by Claire Wahmanholm
You can’t include everything: even the zygote
can be only glanced at in order to fit the agate,
the rainforest, the picture frame, the yolk
of the robin’s egg dripping from blue jay’s beak.
Abundance is fine, but I’m trying to be a xeriscape.
I’m going for less: less dahlia pomp, less of the crepe
myrtle’s messy lushness. I’m swearing off water,
but only its wetness. I’ll keep its rhyme with daughter,
I’ll keep the sound of it hitting the sea, its voice
so vivid it’s green. I didn’t erase
what doesn’t appear, but I still feel uneasy,
as if the leaf were insufficiently gold, the fleecy
cloud not enough like a lamb to pass the test.
I promise it isn’t a test. Plus, when I hear glossed
over, I also know gossamer, tongue, dew, lacquer, sphere,
click, glimmer, lip, glow, globe. It’s all here,
in the smallest room of the dollhouse. The razor
cuts for real, the water runs, the doll child’s incisor
gleams with spit on the hand-stitched quilt.
The fact that I will not have more children used to jolt
me, but not anymore. Now it is a slower pain,
like being dragged home by the wrist. It has kin
wherever never lives. That’s where I’m going. But I’ll open
the blinds and through the frame, see everything: line
after line of lupines; indigo; wet leaves; nasturtiums;
the cold that always comes; the last of the autumn mums.
About the Author:
Claire Wahmanholm is the author of Meltwater (2023), Redmouth (2019), and Wilder (2018). Her work has most recently appeared in, or is forthcoming from, Cream City Review, TriQuarterly, Sierra, Ninth Letter, Blackbird, Washington Square Review, Copper Nickel, and Beloit Poetry Journal. A 2020-2021 McKnight Writing Fellow, and the winner of the 2022 Montreal International Poetry Prize, she lives in the Twin Cities. You can find her on Twitter at @cwahmanholm.
Three more poems by Claire Wahmanholm—“Pain Machine,” “Wonder Machine,” and “Terror Machine”—appear in The Hopkins Review 16.4. Buy the issue in print or on Project MUSE.
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