Miscarriage — Renee Emerson

For more articles, videos, books, and resources about faith and art, visit RabbitRoom.com.

Renee Emerson is a homeschooling mom of five, a Southern transplant living in the Midwest. She is the author of three poetry collections, the most recent of which is Church Ladies (Fernwood Press 2023), and she is the author of a middle-grade novel, Why Silas Miller Must Learn to Ride a Bike (Winter Goose Publishing). She reviews books for the whole family at www.reneeemerson.substack.com, and you can read her blog and poetry on her website: www.renee-emerson.com.

Miscarriage

by Renee Emerson

Even in the suburbs
carefully spaced safety—

the gardens contained in boxes,
cradled above actual earth,

the sparse forest edging houses
like an arm flung across a chest
in a disaster—
Even here, the deer leap
over our neck-high fences
to eat the first apples
off our sapling trees.

Limbs shaking in the wind,
fruit eaten just as they begin
to blush red. 

---

Photo by Anna Kaminova on Unsplash