today we are sad
my non-existent daughter
says and squeezes my dry hand
with her sticky one
I nod and smile but
she shakes her perfect
non-existent head of curls and
tells me to smile more sadly
when I oblige
with a quivering lip
a quiet stream of tears
she still isn’t satisfied
no no like this
look at me
you have to wail
because you mean it
she tells me sadness is meant to be
audible to those around you
that it should be
a summons
she has always been my best teacher
she has been smarter than me
since she was a zygote
who refused to enter this world
as a girl
with briar in her chest
First published in AUB International Poetry Prize Anthology (2022)
“I want to be careful and not attempt to over-explain this poem, because I feel like it says what I was trying to say in a way I would otherwise struggle to articulate. But I think it’s a poem about a love that is so boundless it expresses itself by not forcing someone to experience your pain, and instead allowing them the freedom to exist only in the imagination rather than in a harrowing reality.”
Laura Theis‘ work appears in Poetry, Oxford Poetry, Magma, Rattle, Aesthetica, iamb, etc. Her Elgin-Award-nominated debut how to extricate yourself (2020), an Oxford Poetry Library Book-of-the-Month, won the Brian Dempsey Memorial Pamphlet Prize. A Spotter’s Guide To Invisible Things (2023) received the Live Canon Collection Prize and the Society of Authors’ Arthur-Welton-Award. Other accolades include the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize, AM Heath Prize, Poets & Players Prize, Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize as well as a Forward Prize nomination. Her new collection from Broken Sleep Books and her children’s debut Poems from a Witch’s Pocket (Emma Press) are both forthcoming in 2025.