Dear by Sam Szanto

Dear

What’s it like there?

I imagine you

playing tennis with Auntie Helen,

learning Hungarian from your grandma,

going to the café with Sarah: cola

for you and whisky for her (a double,

she doesn’t have to think about her liver).

I’ll join you all one day.

Anyway, what have I been up to?

The usual: looking after the children, writing,

exercising. I hurt my knee the other week

and thought I’d need physio. Getting old.

It’s cold at the moment.

I’m used to it. Would you be?

You never lived

outside me.

Every year on this day

no-one else remembers,

I think about how old you are not.

Happy sweet sixteen.

I hope you spend the day somewhere

lovely and cosy,

a sub-tropical pool or jacuzzi

where your skin never wrinkles.

Do you remember warmth and water?

I’ve just learned about microchimerism,

where cells are exchanged

via the placenta and stay in

the bodies of mother and baby

for decades, maybe. Potentially

forever.

Give my love to everyone.

Sam Szanto is an award-winning, Pushcart prize-nominated writer living in Durham (UK). Her poetry pamphlet 'This Was Your Mother' was published by Dreich Press in 2024; 'Splashing Pink' (with Annie Cowell), was published by Hedgehog Press in 2023 and was a Poetry Book Society Winter Pamphlet Choice. She has won writing competitions including the 2024 Wirral Festival Poetry Prize, the Charroux Poetry Prize and the First Writer Poetry Prize and has poems in journals including 'Rialto', 'Northern Gravy', ''South Carolina Review' and 'The North'. She is currently working on a practice-led PhD on mother-poetry and identity and is also an editor for 'The Afterpast Review'.