is as red as a newborn’s blood
and filled with enough clay
to make an earthside sculpture
of baby Sylvie.

She, like the fallen babies
beside her, was practically born
into death.

No one knows why,
during that thirty-year span,
the babies of Edmonson County
died within a year of their birth,

or why they were buried,
one beside the other
like a cluster of oyster
mushrooms after the rain—

baby Sylvie at the head
like the patron saint of small,
fleeting souls, with not even
a moldering flower to her name—

but there they lie, little lambs
and doves and angels resting
in that soil, tight and warm
as a mother’s womb.

Megan Hutchinson is a fiction writer and poet from the foothills of southern Ohio whose writing has appeared/is forthcoming in Gravitas and the Kentucky Philological Review among others. She also won first place in the 2020 KSPS Grand Prix Poetry Contest. Currently, she is pursuing her fiction MFA at Western Kentucky University and is working on a novella.