by Jane Zwart

for Rachel Martin

What the stranger gives is in a thousand ways less
than what our kin can give—for instance, names
and new names, nucleotides and years. And if,

between people who belong to one another, it is
not as simple as deserving, still: a lover will belly up
to a sink and wash your hair for only the asking,

but strangers you have to pay. In magnitude,
in recurrence, what we call love from these people
who are ours, it dwarves the love strangers give.

No one will carry you as long as your mother did.
No one will think your laughter quite the medal
your sons say it is. Yes, and for the handkerchief

a passer-by presses on your distress, there will be,
seven times over, your brother, his shirt front.

But there is something about the handkerchief,

something about the door held anonymously open
by someone not beholden to you at all. There is
something about trying not to be seen needing help

and being seen. And about the love that is altogether
unobliged, something. So that remembering it,
we toss out, like a ball too light to throw, the belief

that a woman—not a teacher, not a parent, followed
by a gust of winter into a grade school: she spent
her best wish on a child—was an angel, or like that.

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University and co-edits book review for Plume. 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. You can track her down at janezwart@bsky.social or janezwart.com.