Your ears rest quietly
in boxes
on your dresser top
as you snuggle
with your blue blanket,
you drift into a world
only you know
a dog barks
under the neighbor’s live oak
on this sticky summer night
your sister plays
another song on the piano
while your father and I
begin our conversations
of another day spent
you are filled with a silence
none of us can divine
until another exquisite morning begins
when you will delight in a gift
the rest of us had all night
Sallie Crotty has published many places, including The Dairy Hollow Echo; The Drabble; eMerge; and Resources to Recover. The Writers’ Colony at Dairy Hollow awarded her a residency in 2018. Sallie holds a B.A. in English from Sewanee: The University of the South, an Ed.M. from Harvard, and an MFA in Creative Writing from Queens University of Charlotte. She is working on a poetry collection, and her memoir Out of the Ashes: A Story of Recovery and Hope was published in 2022.
