My Daughter’s Sleeve
POETRY
by Judith Harris
My daughter’s winter parka,
long outgrown,
stays on a wooden hanger,
as if she’d just traipsed home
from her sixth-grade classroom,
shaking off flakes of snow.
I smooth my hand over it,
the outer wool, and brass buttons,
dusty cuffs, and satin lining,
surprising myself
by slipping my palm up
an empty sleeve.
How snug the fit,
my hand stopping where
her shoulder would’ve begun,
trying to reach
backwards in time, to touch
her once more.
Judith Harris is the author of three collections of poetry: Night Garden, published by Tiger Bark Press in 2013, and Atonement and The Bad Secret, published by LSU Press in 2000 and 2006. Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing, a book of nonfiction, was published by SUNY Press in 2003. Her poems have been published in The Nation, The Atlantic, The New Republic, Slate, The Hudson Review, Southern Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, the syndicated newspaper column “American Life in Poetry,” and “Poem-A-Day” from the Academy of American Poets. Harris is currently working on a new book of criticism, The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies, to be published by Routledge in 2022.
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