Poem of the Week | February 10, 2025

“‘Magnificat'” by Matt Poindexter is our Poem of the Week.

Matt Poindexter’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Best New Poets series, Chicago Quarterly Review, Quarterly West, Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. He previously served as the editor of Inch (Bull City Press). He lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina. www.mattpoin.com
 

“Magnificat”

I titled the poem I began for my child
“Magnificat” and wrote four drafts
before the miscarriage.

All December, between the plus sign and silence,
we floated through holiday parties and Advent Sundays,
our secret a cushion of air we alone rode.

The baby grew. So too,
my “Magnificat,” a longer poem than this.
All yelps and rattles in its joy.

I’ll never write another poem so good
as that one would have been, once finished.
Even now, two kids since, I dream it sings to me.

But twelve weeks in the writing stopped.
A doctor in a milky room confirming what we knew.
There was more blood than they expected.

The nurses switched into an urgent whisper
and no one spoke to me. I watched a clear hose
suction red into a machine marked “medical waste”

and I didn’t write a line again for years.

Author’s Note

My wife and I once lost a pregnancy. My early reaction was one of grief, but then there were complications at the ensuing D&C procedure, and I felt something like terror. Thankfully, we made it through and now have two amazing kids, but I left the hospital knowing I had seen and felt things I wasn’t prepared for. It took a long time to write after that, and the poems I worked on before were impossible to engage again. In this poem, I wanted to let those unfinished ideas haunt the page, from the quotation marks in the title down to the unwritten lines of the final tercet.