Elizabeth Bradfield


Swaddled, No Matter

for Gracie

Easier to think of the quilt

buried with her, wrapped

around her deep-ish in the yard’s 

sand.  Fake quilt.  Pieces machine

printed on a cotton-poly bolt,

inner stuffing pulled from some chain 

of chemicals.  It warmed us from our start 

on your attic bedroom futon. That was before

her. 

The bed’s bottom sheet 

was a dark pine and now the same

green rings the cleared space 

around our house where pear tree

and ever-failing rhubarb, where 

hammock and her grave.  

     It was as kind

as we could make it. I held her 

body, carried those last weeks up

stairs and into cars so she could smell

dune and sea. The vet fed her treat 

after treat and she ate them too

fast to taste, as always.  Her bowels

relaxed, she was fecund on my lap 

the ride back home.  Better scent

than whatever sat, unmoving, in her blood.

We dug the hole. We drank manhattans, 

leaning on the shovel.  The quilt, which 

I’d decided 

was too worn for us, 

had become hers years ago.  It had 

thin sateen piping along its edge, rose

gold.  Years before we met, you’d 

used it in your first apartment.  I’ve seen 

the photos of it & the lovers of that time.  And I’m 

not sure whether it comforts me that under 

the sweetfern we planted and the slate stone 

set on top so coyotes couldn’t dig,

the quilt may still, six years on,  

    be whole,

undegradable.  It holds her bones.  Her 

gnawed and sleep-curled form.  Her.  

Gone within its unnatural persistence.


Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the Once Removed, Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work and Toward Antarctica. Theorem, a collaboration with artist Antonia Contro, is forthcoming this fall. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Kenyon Review, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner Fellowship. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press, she works as a naturalist/guide and teaches creative writing at Brandeis University.