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Jennifer Givhan
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Avra

There are stars. I lay down
my body turning

animalia & by that
I mean alcoholic.

A woman floats from a staircase
dangling needle & thread

just out of reach

& buttons my ears,
my eyes. I mean to feel

frightened but haven’t
the heart, so I

thank her & she hands me
a child.

The child laughs
then dies in the strings

of my arms.

This is not yet
ghost story but prelude

for how I became both
living & dead

& it saddens me.

I dip butter-yellow
wafers into milk,

feed them to no one.
The woman returns,

offers me a zipper
as a promise

to take care of me &
it’s rude not to accept promises.

I zip my mouth
like a winter coat―

the stars have turned to icefields
my hands to bees.

Whatever sky
exists does so with snowflakes

& that thought’s not as bleak

as what might’ve happened
had the child lived

one nursery-rhymed morning
its plaything turned Mother

like a stuffed hippo
for holding in bed.

The tradeoff of losing anyone
is love on either side.




Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American poet from the Southwestern desert. Her full-length collection Landscape with Headless Mama won the 2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize. Her honors include an NEA Fellowship, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship, The Frost Place Latin@ Scholarship, The 2015 Lascaux Review Poetry Prize, The Pinch Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best of the Net 2015, Best New Poets 2013, AGNI, TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse, Blackbird, and The Kenyon Review. She is Poetry Editor at Tinderbox Poetry Journal and teaches online workshops at The Poetry Barn. Visit her website here: https://jennifergivhan.com/



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