by Heidi Seaborn
– For my son
Are you happy? My question feels immediately
out of place so that I want to straighten
and fluff it into one of the sofa pillows.
We don’t talk like this, you and I.
Another sofa years ago, in a walk-up in London,
evenings foot-to-foot watching an episode
of Alias where Sydney Bristow kicks the shit
out of a villain in her thigh-high boots
in a techno club in Berlin.
Isn’t that what a good mother does?
And weren’t we happy that year?
Or have I got it all wrong. Maybe,
it was Cairo and Syd’s on a mission
to know the truth about her father—
but first there are bad guys to kill.
And then another decade, and another.
Let’s sit together while your baby sleeps,
rewatch the Alias finale.
You tell me the finale was considered confusing
by the critics, too many unanswered questions.
::
Heidi Seaborn is Executive Editor of The Adroit Journal and winner of the 2022 The Missouri Review Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize in Poetry. She is the author of three award-winning books/chapbooks of poetry: An Insomniac’s Slumber Party with Marilyn Monroe, Give a Girl Chaos, and Bite Marks. Recent work in Blackbird, Beloit, Brevity, Copper Nickel, diode, Financial Times of London, Penn Review, Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, The Slowdown and elsewhere. Heidi holds an MFA from NYU. heidiseabornpoet.com.
Image: “Grenoble Beams” by Sarah J. Sloat
ID: an old postcard of a European city. Brightly colored rectangles jut above the skyline.
Psaltery & Lyre 