The Art of Maybe by Jennifer Mills Kerr

The Art of Maybe

I curl a strand of hair from my

unborn daughter’s face and invent

her name again today.

Like a water bug, I blip across

what might have been,

Charlotte, Ann, Julia, Jane.

Each name, an opening that

never quite meets across the silky blue,

but maybe I can discern a path,

maybe absence can be spoken.

I absorb the ink-dark around

stenciled stars–

I have no children.

The phrase swallows air.

She’s seven, now nineteen, a tomboy,

maybe a ballet dancer. She carries

Jane Eyre, other days a handed

down violin. Some days she has

freckles like me, others she looks

like someone I’ve never seen.

At unlikely times, unlikely places,

she suddenly appears, the way I

discover string half-buried beneath

the azalea or wrapped around an

old shoebox that’s empty.

I sculpt a ball with loose pieces,

a circle, the only shape I can create,

but what I call it changes: maybe

a globe, perhaps a wheel,

sometimes a womb.

Jennifer Mills Kerr’s poetry has been recently published in The Inflectionist Review, MORIA, & SWWIM. Jennifer hosts art-inspired writing circles online and curates poems on the Poetry-Inspired Substack (@JenniferMillsKerr). Read more of poetry at https://jennifermillskerr.carrd.co