Nancy Scott McBride’s most recent poem to appear here was “It’s Just Poetry. It Won’t Bite.” (August 2016) 

Printmaking
By Nancy Scott McBride

1.
When he was quite young,
my son showed me a fossil he’d
unearthed in our yard.
It was a small gray stone with the imprint of a
tiny perfect shell recessed in it.
“This land was under the sea once,” I told him,
closing his hand over it.
“It’s a treasure. Keep it.”

2.
The photograph of the woman jumping
from the World Trade Center,
pocketbook in hand,
will be engraved on my brain for life.

3.
The morning you leave, we turn in bed,
hold our bodies hard together;
your beard searing my face,
your chest etching my breast,
steel press of parting rolling over us.