Gravestones: A Series of Prose Poems
The Many, Simple Graves
By Megan Baxter

Like the teeth of each graveyard, whitened, crocked, some sunk back beneath the earth. And this is the greatest sadness, that feeling of walking on eggshells, on the small, smallest graves of children. Maybe they really had no name, not even an hour to call their own in stone, so all that stands for nine months warm growing, and hope, and loss, is a marker no larger than a man’s hand, open, empty. The many simple graves crowd out the rest. There are no stories under ground here, the story is the grief that lingered with the living, the milk heavy in the breast, the blood of labor, the struggle to reproduce.