Fairy Ring
Imagine your mother died and as she died she fed you and you grew up
as she grew down and she was not even a she but a skytunnel deepdown
plosive accordion of darkness and light but she so you can understand
where you are in the space of this imagining imagine her soil serpentine
biting sweetdark iron became your winesap your throughness she who
was made of ocean and held clouds and could make it rain she who held
wandering feet and singing and whose voice was come here who said
a crevice is a home a knot a tousle a breaking is a home no fluttering
slickness turned away but inside she was turgid force a reverse waterfall
whose old stock could recall no-flower the way-way time of no-spider
and the dying was slow oh it was slow unshearing the titan sugar by sugar
unbreathing her circles gently and then one sun the dying was fast
not by sky shake or flame coil but a no-name breaking brought from afar
it chased time out of our depths into the steel maw it swallowed centuries
so that the forests are new now nurseries full of circles who ask each other
what kind of love is falling out of life what kind of love is falling into it
love she fell into us or was fallen it is so hard to think about can you imagine?
Formation
Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of seven poetry collections: Redwood Communal (forthcoming, Green Writers Press); Each Time You Carry Me This Way (chapbook forthcoming, Orison); the collaborative chapbook, Dear Question: A Conversation, with L.I. Henley (Glass Lyre Press); Foxlogic, Fireweed (Backwaters Press/University of Nebraska Press); Little Spells; 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, her poems have appeared widely in journals, recently or forthcoming in About Place, Maine Review, Massachusetts Review, One, Orion, Plume, Poet Lore, Solstice, South Dakota Review, and Waxwing. She teaches poetry workshops at the University of Redlands in California.
Read more by Jennifer K. Sweeney originally appearing in Terrain.org: two poems, two poems, and four poems, as well an essay, “White Noise.”
Header photo by ikbendewereld, courtesy Shutterstock.
