About the Poems - AN
About the Poems
by Amber Nelson Everybody went for breakfast at Elmer's except me, though everyone remembers me as being there. When I remind my friend, for the third time, that I wasn't there, she tells me, "it was your ghost to my left." When the waitress came, somebody ordered a Dutch Baby Combo and everyone decided, including my ghost, that we would all write chapbooks by that name. One day, in the Spring of 2010, I needed to write. I needed to say something. Need was burning. A friend suggested I write Dutch Baby Combo. In a matter of hours, these poems were born. Out of the hole burned in my belly. I hadn't planned on writing about my abortion. I didn't know the hole was there until after. I had forgotten. The hole was a ghost too. But after the poems were written I knew that we, and all our ghosts, had loved and been loved.