"If You Aren't Explicit, They'll Say You Never Mentioned the War" by Asa Drake
My newsfeed is all about babies.
Helen is so tired and so relieved;
her baby born a few weeks early.
The Blue Ridge Mountains are full
of weaned opossum. The wildlife
rescue continues to tell me who
survives, who passes. Even
the dead have news. This little
Whydah passed the next day.
He was warm and comfortable.
In all the photos are living animals.
It's early fall. In the video
of a hospital press conference, a man
on the ground by the podium holds
a baby. I look closely and ask Instagram
to suggest fewer posts about God
and motherhood. I'm most
likely to like a photo of a wild animal
because I fear what the algorithm
will bring. God, the babies.
Asa Drake is a Filipina American poet and author of the chapbook One Way to Listen (Gold Line Press, 2023). She has received fellowships and awards from the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest, the Florida Book Awards, Tin House and Idyllwild Arts. Her poems have been published by The Slowdown Podcast, The American Poetry Review, The Paris Review Daily and The Georgia Review.
