By Emily Arnold-Fernández

How do I tell the weeping?

They call it the looking stone.

The place you waved

to your best friend, sent off

to Canada because the land

could no longer provide.

Or your landlord wanted it.

Or he bankrupted himself

trying to save his tenants

so after the money was gone

they had to leave.

The seals gibber like greeting

bairns — like wailing children,

the way we say it with our

Scottish tongues. It sounds

like the taste of saltwater

on chapped lips, the sting

of spray in the eyes as you try

to look through the clear light

filtering through the watery

surface, seeking fairyland.

Today, everyone has a different

version of the story. Emigration

was a blessing or a curse, or both,

but either way you had no choice.

You went where you were told.

Young ones today think

they can craft their lives

or at least call their best friend

but in my lifetime, forever

was forever.

At the hospital of St. Camillus

I see two women whom I vaguely know,

as strangers do, who live in midsize towns:

one blonde, her neck still smooth; the other worn.

We’ve seen each other here and there, “around”.

The younger one looks tired. The older has

a gaze that says she’s seen it all before.

I wonder what they see within my face?

But they are looking, anxious, toward the door.

The blonde, I think, has lately realized

she’ll lose her father. Not today, but soon.

We nod in silence, then avert our eyes,

pretend the other could be in this room

for any reason but the one we know.

I sign to take my father’s body home.

Elegy for the unborn

We birth our children through water —

gushing down our legs, pushing

out our daughters, carrying them

toward oceans where life began.

I can say that only in the past tense.

In Michigan, the mining spread

like cancer, taking over our Mother

Superior. We wait for the pillbugs

like wives for the drillers, but not

enough come home. In the Hudson,

the fingerbones of dead ports

rise blackened from the waning

tide, their names for waterways

all forgotten: an ancient language

rotting out of meaning. In every

generation there’s poison, but ours

tastes like shame and misplaced hubris,

and sits like lead in the intestines.

They say such wounds are messy,

and nearly always fatal.

How can we not be elegiac

in these days? The end of men

will be the end of women too. How

will our children survive now,

when our waters are broken?

Emily Arnold-Fernández is an immigrant from California who now lives in Scotland. In a previous life, she founded the global refugee human rights organization Asylum Access. Her poems appear in Magma, Cordite, Aeos, New Writing Scotland and others. She tends to live on islands. (Instagram: @emilyarnoldfernandez)

The End of the World

Three poems

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