Jennifer K. Sweeney
I will break into my life for my life
Headline: “Woman accidentally joins search party looking for herself.”
A woman on a bus.
A woman buying milk.
You can go missing,
whispering Surtsey, your finger running
across the map’s lava fields.
To fade into the measure of daily noise:
sometimes a relief, unbecoming
sometimes a spill, bleeding out.
A volcano in winter.
Strange birds everywhere.
Surtsey makes your hands tender
things in pockets. Praise
watching a man in a foreign post office
threefold a letter and shimmy it
into the envelope.
Praise the clarity of running
a brush through hair at a roadstop.
Running the hot and cold
which are both cold, you can go
pulling at a shirt’s loose threads.
And over Styrofoam coffee, a woman is gone,
everyone agrees. Hearing her story from a distance
you do not recognize the woman is you
and they do not recognize the woman is you.
Who would not join the search?
No one is sure of her
name but you hold its possibility
in your mouth. You want to chase her
out of the night. She has come
a long way and you don’t
want her to miss the flood
basalt, the delicacy of ash
you tongue in the air.
*I am the promised one; the announced one/ Brighten the road, dear/ from Jacobo Fijman’s Vespers of Anguish
Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of three poetry collections: Little Spells, newly released from New Issues Press, How to Live on Bread and Music, which received the James Laughlin Award, the Perugia Press Prize and a nomination for the Poets’ Prize, and Salt Memory. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission, and a Hedgebrook residency, her work has recently appeared in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard, Linebreak, Mid-American Review, New American Writing, Pleiades, Puerto del Sol, and Verse Daily, and is forthcoming atThe Washington Post. See more at www.jenniferksweeney.com
Return to March 2016 Edition
Headline: “Woman accidentally joins search party looking for herself.”
A woman on a bus.
A woman buying milk.
You can go missing,
whispering Surtsey, your finger running
across the map’s lava fields.
To fade into the measure of daily noise:
sometimes a relief, unbecoming
sometimes a spill, bleeding out.
A volcano in winter.
Strange birds everywhere.
Surtsey makes your hands tender
things in pockets. Praise
watching a man in a foreign post office
threefold a letter and shimmy it
into the envelope.
Praise the clarity of running
a brush through hair at a roadstop.
Running the hot and cold
which are both cold, you can go
pulling at a shirt’s loose threads.
And over Styrofoam coffee, a woman is gone,
everyone agrees. Hearing her story from a distance
you do not recognize the woman is you
and they do not recognize the woman is you.
Who would not join the search?
No one is sure of her
name but you hold its possibility
in your mouth. You want to chase her
out of the night. She has come
a long way and you don’t
want her to miss the flood
basalt, the delicacy of ash
you tongue in the air.
*I am the promised one; the announced one/ Brighten the road, dear/ from Jacobo Fijman’s Vespers of Anguish
Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of three poetry collections: Little Spells, newly released from New Issues Press, How to Live on Bread and Music, which received the James Laughlin Award, the Perugia Press Prize and a nomination for the Poets’ Prize, and Salt Memory. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, a grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission, and a Hedgebrook residency, her work has recently appeared in Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series, American Poetry Review, Cimarron Review, Crab Orchard, Linebreak, Mid-American Review, New American Writing, Pleiades, Puerto del Sol, and Verse Daily, and is forthcoming atThe Washington Post. See more at www.jenniferksweeney.com
Return to March 2016 Edition