The Bucket
by Regina Gort Betances
You will always be mourning
even when you enter a day
which doesn’t hurt, when you don’t
wake up aching or saying their names.
The children you carried. The one you buried
who never emerged from your womb,
alive. The other two you cremated, spread
over mountain berms into the mouths of brooks.
When you set down your bucket
it doesn’t mean you’ve forgotten.
Regina Gort Betances is a retired chef who prefers thimbleberries to huckleberries. She grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan where fiddleheads, chanterelles and skinny dips were abundant. She now lives in Puerto Rico, the island of her heritage and in the bounty of mango trees and sea turtle snorkeling. Betances’s first collaborative poem was published in North Dakota Quarterly. Her works are published in Rova Magazine, Deep Wild Journal, The Journal of Latina Critical Feminism, and The Dewdrop.