The Closest Thing to Hope I Could Find

Jane Zwart

A week after she tells me she has cancer,

I buy my mother an amaryllis. In its wax

jacket, the bulb is a grenade, as life,

balled-up, is always a grenade: onion, crocus,

fetus. Which grows faster, cancer or a fetus?

When I was nine and we were learning

the myths, and, I’ll tell you, one thing

was always hiding inside another—

a score of Greeks in a wooden horse,

Odysseus wearing a ram’s stance—

I befriended a girl based solely on the part

she played in a skit. One thing was hiding

inside another: inside a cardboard box

lay the girl who would be my friend, knees

pulled up to her chest; she was waiting

for the roof to open, she was waiting to let fly

the buckshot of black papers crumpled

in her hands. Every sheet was a missile,

an illness, a curse. One caught the girl

playing Pandora in the chest. One landed

on my desk. And then she, the girl

I would befriend, stepped over the high edge

of the box, while a boy read the end

of the story. Even then I knew there was

a beginning hiding inside the end,

that hope is the fetus, the bulb, the grenade.

JANE ZWART teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, HAD, and Ploughshares, and her first collection of poems is coming out with Orison Books in fall 2025.