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Shuttering My Boy

Today’s poem is “Shuttering My Boy” by Annaliese Jakimides. Her poems and essays have been published in many journals, magazines, and anthologies, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Utne Reader, and This I Believe II: More Personal Philosophies of Remarkable Men and Women. After 27 years on a dirt road in Mount Chase, population 193, she now lives in downtown Bangor.
She writes: “Poetry is a magical tool that can allow you to process intense grief, and intense joy, in surprising ways. It was years before I could put a word to paper about the loss of my youngest son at 21, but when I could, 'Shuttering My Boy' provided the lens through which I could begin to see/be the bigger picture.”

Shuttering My Boy
by Annaliese Jakimides

The shutter catches the reedy boy and his size 44 pants dancing around his hips,
the click of metallic and plastic and synchronization 
familiar in my ear, under my finger. But after he is gone, really gone, 
and I have processed all the old rolls of film, every one, I cannot find 
him and his pants, the belt and the way the sun leaked through the window,
spilling onto one shoulder, like butter on the cast iron black of his T-shirt.

Up under my breastbone where the acid now lodges some mid-nights, 
I carry all the other non-photos: 

his slouch…

his barely brushed teeth…

his fingers resting on the rim of the crystal goblet he told me   
he wanted when I died—I don’t know what to do with it now…

his singing, low in his throat…

his bony knees bent under his chest in sleep while the snow falls 
onto the world beyond: layers of water and silt and rock: nothing I can do 
will hurry him or promise me I can reach through the window…

his words flying up, out of his mouth, telling stories (of cars and   
baseball and ocean in the early morning)… 

his hand loose on my sweatered shoulder, his heart beating against my back…

his hip slung out to the side, fragile in the cracked light, denying 
he had stolen the five watches, all the while eying 
the raspberry Danish with its red-seeded center on the kitchen table…

his coaly eyes focused on me, insisting 
I hold on: don’t turn away, this is not a dare, pass the test,
please pass the test, no matter how tough I make the ride.

Poem copyright © 2019 Annaliese Jakimides.