"anthem" & "new moon rules" by Elle Cantwell

anthem

i’ll begin with an admission - that night all those february winters ago with its primal midwest bone chilling wind whipping up a honey of a snowstorm was mostly a blur. you were five days late and showing no signs of your impending arrival, clearly you were just fine where you were, thank you, until midafternoon when you proceeded to inititate operation bodyslam in earnest. by the time your father drag raced us up lake shore drive to the hospital i was so deep in the hellfire they call back labor i could barely string three words together and he turned sheer shakespearean, declared to every medical professional within earshot at the emergency room my name followed immediately by she’ll take an epidural now, and believe me when i tell you he was backlit stage left just right when finally they hooked me up. and i went boneless. then apparently a long phase lapsed where i mostly cooed and slept like some sort of drunken dove past midnight into saturday. so when it was time to descend from my marshmallow cloud to the battlefield i needed to snap out of it and here’s where it got real again, hours of me pushing to the state of limp noodle with no baby to show for it, hours and then signs that your heart rate was falling, and kid, here’s where i swear i felt its pulse, the soft syncopation of it, and i willed your heartbeat, that little song ready to play and confession, i chartered a bargain with the universe that moment, that as long as you lived i’d be perfectly content to be on the sidelines cheering you on, i’d win the olympic medal for wishing you the world, for letting your anthem be the one that mattered most.

new moon rules

call today indigo/trust a falling 

leaf/exhaust your enemies/simmer 

fifteen cherry tomatoes/drink the sky

and swallow twilight/slice lemons at dusk/

wink at a puppy/skip rocks in puddles/watch 

lightning bugs break the dark/blow kisses 

to raindrops/sketch yesterday in yellow/

take a nap with a daisy/count afternoon 

clouds/color your dreams lavender/tell 

a songbird your secrets/paint midnight 

a whisper/sneak green in the window/

dance with a dandelion/tickle a feather/sing 

to stars on a rooftop/moon the moon/

whistle to the rhythm of your heart’s 

blossoming/write a love note to paper

Elle Cantwell is a graduate of the MFA in Writing program at the University of San Francisco. Her poems have appeared in Ponder Review, Welter, Roi Fainéant Press, Barrelhouse and Seneca Review, among other publications. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and a winner of the Jeff Marks Memorial Poetry Prize. A freelance theatre director and editorial specialist, she lives in Santa Monica, California.