When We Lived in Michigan
When we lived in Michigan, and Mavis
was a baby, I was taking her
to visit southern relations
while you stayed behind to work. This was
back when we rented the apartment with the perfectly
circular room that, each September, filled with a din
of cluster flies: rattling at the windows, or dying
on the floor, flies we could never seem to sweep away.
You took our daughter in your arms—
a tiny creature, born too soon, swaddled, miniature fists,
her eyes still blue—and wept with your mouth pressed
against her head, while my parents idled in a car outside,
suitcases weighty in their trunk. It was as if you already knew
how briefly we would be a family, how you would not
live to see the college graduation or the first
apartment in Boston. You held her and wept—
your eyes black with knowing—and then, so gently,
you placed her in my arms.
Faith Shearin’s seven books of poetry include: The Owl Question (May Swenson Award), Telling the Bees (SFA University Press), Orpheus, Turning (Dogfish Poetry Prize), Darwin’s Daughter (SFA University Press), and Lost Language (Press 53). Her poems have been read aloud on The Writer’s Almanac and included in American Life in Poetry. She has received awards from Yaddo, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. Her essays and short stories have appeared in: The Sun, New Ohio Review, The Missouri Review, The Florida Review, and Literal Latte, among others. Her novel, Lost River, 1918 won the YA Global Fiction Prize and has been published in the US and UK by Leapfrog Press. A new novel, One Life on Land, won the Voices Uplift Award and is forthcoming in 2026 from Jaded Ibis Press.
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