Jennifer K. Sweeney

The snow leopard mother runs straight
down the mountain.
Elk cliff. Blizzard.
Hammers keening
...

There are mnemonics for remembering bird calls.
Listen to my evening sing-ing-ing-ing croons the vesper sparrow,
But-I-DO-love you pleads the Eastern meadowlark
...

Seedfluff gathers in white canals along the path
but how to locate the source:
some bramble let-go into all possible
...

There is a blue city in mind
constructed slantways
along a rippling canal,
clean and unpeopled but for a musician
...

Wear your bones like cold-rolled
steel, skin hammered
in brigandine sheets.
...

You need not confront the storm
though it comes with its guillotine
of wind and arrows of ice.
Let it come.
...

In the scoliosis clinic, I waited in a room of skeletons
while men reshaped the architecture of my sister,
spongy discs stacked in S-curves
...

It was theatrical once,
the arrivals and departures,
cathedral ceilings, opera windows
and burgundy velvet couches.
...

You're going to need soil and not out of the bag
but a vegetal mud dampened by umbrella fern,
a little scat, silt, shreds of orange peel
for the proper asexual cavedom.
...

Under the ponderosa pine, a family
of deer gathered in late autumn,
chewing on chucked corncobs from August dinners
or our windfall of mealy tree-apples.
...

after the waiting years leaden years
keening oceanside for an answer
from the original dark
...

This is a capsized game
and there is no display of aces at the end.
Buy a rare and expensive plant that never blooms.
Rearrange your books by the color of the spines.
...

That mostly we do our living in houses,
rooms inside houses within rows of houses
and everyone is a supporting character in the story
...

In your sleep
the year advanced.
Perhaps in a Japanese rainstorm
...

Steady the freight trains
like daily missives
from other-where—
...

To be doubled
as in greater than
I + I
zygote pair
...

I don't have to remind you of destruction
or how far away from origins
we travel each day,
but consider the prismatic faith
...

I am, myself, three selves at least,
the one who sweeps the brittle
bees, who saves the broken plates
...