PROSE POETRY
ANNE BERGERON
HEREAFTER, STARLIGHT
On the rock dry island of Sicily a glacier muscles into a volcano’s womb. Steel blue crater holds what will one day melt. In a dim Catania pensione, faded sheets. Perseids’ glittering stones streak across an indigo sky. I woke to clang and knell of duomo bells, your placenta separating. In utero blu, the clinician said - how blood looks like sapphires or maybe a bruise when imaged. Not unlike our blue planet seen from space, I thought, but did not say. A search for meaning referential, as tremors shook my emptying belly and a hot red river streamed. Decades later, this is what I know: A uterus moves glacially under its own weight. Newborn novas destroy their stellar wombs in order to live. Ice from Mount Etna provides fresh water downstream. You went back to the stars.
Anne Bergeron is the finalist for the 2023 Barry Lopez Creative Non-Fiction award. Her work appears in The Hopper, Dark Matter: Women Witnessing, About Place, Flyway, and others. She lives and teaches in the hills of eastern Vermont.
