By Maudie Bryant
My face softens
inside the profile
of my son.
I promised
I’d live in the moment,
but I’m already looking back
while he taps
his chin like that.
I do the same,
finger to face
then eyes to ceiling
as if memory lurks
in corners.
I turn. The habit follows—
he’s doing it again.
Not imitating.
Simply becoming.
I reach for him
to pull a shirt hem,
tug up a sock,
smooth down a curl,
but I’m touching
a former version
of myself—
still soft,
still tender.
Ripples On The Water by Jennifer Weigel
About the Author
Maudie Bryant is a poet and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the complexities of memory and identity. A graduate of the University of Louisiana Monroe (M.A. in English), she creates to unearth the disquiet beneath the surface of human experience. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Progenitor, Welter, and 3Elements Review. Maudie balances full-time work, motherhood, and her creative practice while living in Shreveport, Louisiana with her husband and two young sons.
About the Artist
Jennifer Weigel is a multi-disciplinary mixed media conceptual artist. Weigel utilizes a wide range of media to convey her ideas, including assemblage, drawing, fibers, installation, jewelry, painting, performance, photography, sculpture, video and writing. Much of her work touches on themes of beauty, identity (especially gender identity), memory & forgetting, sociopolitical discourse, and institutional critique. Weigel’s art has been exhibited nationally in all 50 states and has won numerous awards.