An Ekphrasis for Margaret Grace, by Abigail Card

Margaret Grace, by Sarah Bolerjack (USA) 1994

An Ekphrasis for Margaret Grace
 
Your image incises my favourite intaglio print,
massive, at four-by-two to your four-eleven,
red lines bleeding into the blueness of you
 
the curling into a womb robbed 
of a baby you weren’t allowed to know,
a baby you’d search for 
in every room 
but never find.
 
And the men who consumed you,
hungry for your delicate lines,
for your soft curls,
for life leaking like light 
from the violet glint of your eyes.
 
I wonder, sinking 
into your saturated cloud, 
shaped by a rounded tarlatan rag, 
a whisper looping in swift, precise circles across 
the four-by-two plate, by your sister’s hands,
first etched in her synapses decades before,
now bleeding in archival ink,
on archival paper,
you, an archive lost, an archive held.
 
You: fourteen, in an attic, and already mourning.

Abigail Card
 
Abigail Card holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Portland State University and is the Managing Editor for Cider Press Review. Her work is published or forthcoming in Cimarron Review, For Women Who Roar, Bending Genres, and others. Her work centres around dismantling the silencing of women, unraveling grief, and exploring neurodivergence through the lens of voice. When she isn’t writing, she’s usually tromping through old-growth forests, curled up with coffee, or traveling with her family. She currently resides on the coast of Maine.
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