Year of the Tiger

By: Siobhan Casey

You are not sentimental and rarely afraid

to show your toothless gums.

I call you Kai-Kai

and Tiger-tiger,

when I reach the room

where I hold your silk

head in my hands, your skin

olive and smooth against

a map of oxygen tubes.

You are like your father

the world is already busy saying,

as if dominant genes determine everything.

I disagree because you are newness, infancy itself.

And it seems I have been writing the poem

of this moment for most of my life:

of hearing my child’s voice

and not being able to hold

you just yet, the room suddenly cerulean:

river of turquoise spinal

block, blue scrubs under the blare

of light, ocean of birth

around us.

The nurses are fashioning tools,

sewing the imaginary axis

of a woman’s body back together.

They say it is mine, the curved line

a five-inch scar

quiet in comparison

to the roar

and caw of you.

---

Siobhan Casey is an aspiring artist whose poetry has appeared in Weave Magazine, Shadyside Review, and Coal Hill Review. She has worked as an editor for the Fourth River and earned her MFA from Chatham University in 2011. Her chapbook, Three Fourths of a Dream, was published in 2016. She is currently completing an inclusive elementary education degree. She hopes to grow a tiny farm of orchids and loves chasing her zany dog and daughter up and down the southern coast of Boston.