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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
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      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
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      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
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      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
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      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
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      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
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      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025

Jennifer Sweeney

Field Accomplice 


She lives in a grove cottage, her mossy vapors
seeping out the cracked stone door.

She flies around for hours begging me to catch her in my throat.

She is legally blind and wears thick glasses
in which the future is inscribed in tintype.

She is a dwarf star with one eye on the moon.

A hired mourner I do not know how to fire.

She keeps a diary of pocket ghosts,
spends autumn putting dead leaves back on the trees.

When I look her up in the dictionary, it says:
rubicon     melting snow     emptied egg
ornate mercy     lo and behold     darkling     to beckon     to muddle


She prefers a collage of the sea
instead of the sea.

Occasionally she offers practical advice:
forget renovation, a dark horse can do a lot for a lackluster house.

As private as breath, there is no entering another’s grief.

Heavy as a sunken gown, light as a matchstick.


Blueberries in Michigan 


A season in time-lapse whisks by
wrinkled and wrong
where streets veer into distance
through unmapped towns
and the dusty community church
stands like a sentinel next to the freight tracks,
searchlight of the diner
blinking its worn constellation.
What is it to never leave a place—
small plot of tumble and grit,
tractor rusting in the wheat--
or to arrive here from Mexico,
a migrant family stashed in storage shacks
to wait out the rise of prized fruit,
the coveted hands of children
nimble enough to pluck blueberries
in noon heat without collapsing ripe skins.
When fingerprints are rinsed
away in the colander, jam preserved,
pies baked and ribboned in town fairs,
the workers emerge from hiding
in the dying light of August,
blue hands in pockets
and make their silent exodus
from the back of beyond.


Not-Yet-But-Soon 


For months you heard the insistence of Not-Yet, even tasted it in the bread that took hours to chew. Hold on the voice said. For-a-while. You go on, with the vestiges of your heart. You go on with the ordinary grace of washing your hands when they are dirty, turning off the lights when no one’s in the room. The waiting consumes as you knew it would. You throw figurative things off a cliff. This helps some. Meanwhile the trifold of winter expands to a groundswell. Meanwhile the slipstream. Then the moon is breaking up with you all over again and you knew it was coming but it’s awful all the same. Consequence never seemed a sultry word before, but now the way the q slinks its way toward the soft c, you can hold it in your mouth past noon. You walk a lot. In the vaulted forest you hear barred owls, bullfrogs. Both announce from their whole bodies. Under the sodden leaves you spot something twiggy. Downturned bowl of bird-matter ovoid in your hands. Oh void says the heart. On the windowsill the nest houses a tryst of light. Not-yet-but-soon it says.
​

The Rehearsal 

                                          
Every month I tried to make of my body
a home. I was an hourglass
made of shell, made of bone.
I lay under the Perseids and let the stars

hold up the night. There was me and the idea
of you. I saw for both of us—
tule elk silent among ferns,
sunset lying pink over a field of Dakota corn.

In the museum, I walked through a hall of Buddhas.
Felt the cool lotus curve in the half-dark.
Granite, terra cotta, bronze.
If I could have made you like that—

I would have held the hammer,
I would have opened the stone.


Winterproofing


Returned to zero after a decade,
we hear the Canada geese
drain the sky.

I want to go back.
To before I knew this would be so hard.
To the beginning of us

when I first dreamt our child
was a wood sprite we chased through
redwood trees.

I winterproof,
buy bushels of tomatoes to roast and freeze,
place osage oranges in the windowsills

to ward off insects.
Everything wants to come in.
I hear a bat trapped between the walls

for a week, abide with the knowing,
then the silence.
Snow falls on the ultrasound.

We search the static for eggs.
The needle injects its promise
and I am waiting again.

On the porch at midnight,
the first shimmer of flakes
make a visual music.

Some things I don’t remember from before—
when all the leaves have shed,
the bare trees are full of nests.


 

​
--
Jennifer K. Sweeney’s second poetry collection, How to Live on Bread and Music, received the 2009 James Laughlin Award from the Academy of America Poets and the Perugia Press Prize. Her first book, Salt Memory, won the 2006 Main Street Rag Poetry Award. Her poems have been translated into Turkish and published widely in literary journals including American Poetry Review, Poetry Daily and the 2009 Pushcart Prize anthology. She currently teaches poetry at Kalamazoo College in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she lives with her husband, poet Chad Sweeney and their son, Liam.

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  • Home
  • About
    • Our Story
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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
      • Luiza Maia Spring 2024
      • Christy Lee Rogers Spring 2024
      • Erika Lynet Salvador Spring 2024
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Diamond Forde Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Charlie Coleman Spring 2024
      • Isabelle Doyle Spring 2024
      • Reyzl Grace Spring 2024
      • Kelly Gray Spring 2024
      • Meredith Herndon Spring 2024
      • Mina Khan Spring 2024
      • Anoushka Kumar Spring 2024
      • Cate Latimer Spring 2024
      • BEE LB Spring 2024
      • Grace Marie Liu​ Spring 2024
      • Sarah Mills Spring 2024
      • Faisal Mohyuddin 2024
      • Marcus Myers Spring 2024
      • Mike Puican Spring 2024
      • Sarah Sorensen Spring 2024
      • Lynne Thompson Spring 2024
      • Natalie Tombasco Spring 2024
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2024
      • Donna Vorreyer Spring 2024
    • Fiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Bryan Betancur Spring 2024
      • Karen George Spring 2024
      • Raja'a Khalid Spring 2024
      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
      • Adina Polatsek Spring 2024
      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
      • Matthew Fertel Fall 2024
      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
      • Jian Kim Fall 2024
      • Robb Kunz Fall 2024
      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
      • Clayre Benzadón Fall 2024
      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
      • Sara Burge Fall 2024
      • Judith Chalmer Fall 2024
      • Stephanie Choi Fall 2024
      • Sarah Jack Fall 2024
      • Jen Karetnick Fall 2024
      • Ae Hee Lee Fall 2024
      • Svetlana Litvinchuk Fall 2024
      • Mary Lou Buschi Fall 2024
      • Angie Macri Fall 2024
      • Gary McDowell Fall 2024
      • Sam Moe Fall 2024
      • Camille Newsom Fall 2024
      • Elizabeth O'Connell- Thompson Fall 2024
      • Olatunde Osinaike Fall 2024
      • Jessica Pierce Fall 2024
      • Diane Raptosh Fall 2024
      • Isaac Richards Fall 2024
      • Robyn Schelenz Fall 2024
      • Christopher Shipman Fall 2024
      • Alex Tretbar Fall 2024
      • Ruth Williams Fall 2024
      • Shannon K. Winston Fall 2024
      • Wendy Wisner Fall 2024
      • Anne Gerard Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Fiction Fall 2024 >
      • J​oe Baumann Fall 2024
      • ​Morganne Howell Fall 2024
      • Matt Paczkowski Fall 2024
      • Ryan Peed Fall 2024
      • Gabriella Pitts Fall 2024
      • James Sullivan Fall 2024
  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
      • Paul Simmons Spring 2025
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2025
      • Elzbieta Zdunek Spring 2025
      • Na Yoon Amelia Cha-Ryu Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
      • ​Bleah Patterson Spring 2025
      • ​M.A. Scott Spring 2025
      • ​Liam Strong ​ Spring 2025
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2025
      • ​Cassandra Whitaker Spring 2025
      • Angelique Zobitz Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
      • K. J. Coyle Spring 2025
      • Meredith MacLeod Davidson Spring 2025
      • Jessica Mosher Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025