is the hardest kind. A tube the diameter of a birthday candle,
length of a no.2 pencil, sits above lungs not ready to breathe.
The baby is stiller than his parents in vinyl recliners next to him,
adorned in rubber duck yellow isolation gowns, baby boy blue
plastic gloves, faces fearful of being hurt and hurting something so fragile
when allowed to hold him, their baby, being warmed, breathed and fed through
tubes. They watch him through walls of his clear container,
like the way the father hopes they will one day catch fireflies in a jar,
wait for the movement of light.
Heidi VanderVelde is a pediatrician residing in Auburn, Alabama. She is an MFA candidate in fiction at Warren Wilson College. Heidi is the recipient of the Robert Hughes Mount Jr. Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the winner of the Sand Hills Literary Magazine 2024 Poetry Contest, and a finalist in Breakwater Review's Peseroff Poetry Contest. She has also been published in Passengers Journal, Poetry South, and Epiphany.