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Lost
Celia Lisset Alvarez

Worry didn’t let me love you,
my sweet babe.
I focused so much
on keeping the formula inside you,
on making sure your heart was beating,
on counting your wet diapers,
that I failed to notice
the first time you slid your chubby elbows back
and lifted your head,
or the first time you sat up.
I was so focused on the growth chart,
I failed to see you grow.
You never learned how to crawl.
One day you just grabbed the furniture
and started cruising,
and one day you let go.

—
Celia Lisset Alvarez is a writer and educator from Miami, Florida. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of Miami and has four collections of poetry: Shapeshifting (winner of the 2005 Spire Press Poetry Award), The Stones (Finishing Line Press, 2006), Multiverses (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and Bodies & Words (Assure Press, 2022). Her stories and poetry have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently in DarkWinter Literary Magazine, Last Leaves Magazine, and dyst. She has work forthcoming in the anthologies SMEOP 2: HOT (Black Sunflower Press) and The Book of Life after Death (Tolsun Books), as well as in Blue Mountain Review. Nominated for both the Pushcart and Best of the Net Prizes, she was also the editor of the literary journal Prospectus: A Literary Offering. She now teaches at Our Lady of Lourdes Academy. Her 2021 poetry collection, Multiverses, a finalist in the narrative poetry category of American Book Fest’s Best Book Awards, chronicles the loss of her twenty-six-day-old son in 2018.

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