by Donora Shaw
after Skyrim; for Molly Brodak
In the game he resurrects a creature,
walrus-like, that comes
galumphing after him
in the way I feel
I am kept, in the way
I admired your precise grace
like the end of a crystal snapped
off in a wound. Something is
growing inside me because I asked.
I wonder what you never
asked for. Off camera
the child’s laughter like Satan’s bells,
like fruit.
Donora Shaw (née Hillard) is the author of the poetry book Jeff Bridges (with illustrations by Goodloe Byron; Cobalt Press, 2016) and several other works of poetry and theory. Shaw’s poems have been recognized by the Poetry Foundation, Poets House, and The Pushcart Prize, and her work appears in Hint Fiction (W.W. Norton & Company), Pedagogy, Women in Clothes (Penguin Random House), and other anthologies and journals as well as on CNN, MSNBC, and WBEZ Chicago (NPR). She lives in her home state of Pennsylvania with her husband and family and recently gave birth to her first child, a daughter named Merrin.