I don't want to write about the suicide
but a neck is more than what's above and below.
An oily expression hangs on the clementine.
The plum. A willow is a structure
to hold both color and restrain
further sway. Her movement
the tall grass believed
and then slanted over.
Up the road I turn to where she turned
and then away as if inhabiting a lost joke
or trying to pivot back
something a breath might. Bark
is both what she steadied
herself against and a sound
she once said was silly to make.
©
is an MFA graduate from California College of the Arts. Recent poems have appeared in Fine Line Magazine, H_NGM_N, and in a chapbook, You Are Not a Bird, from Dancing Girl Press. She lives in the town where she grew up.
Jern-Miller’s poem “quartz heading towards palomino” also appears in this issue.
