A Poem by Jennifer K. Sweeney

Sometimes when I write it feels like I am lifting

here is a little performance about beauty     there’s one 

about what the owl does to the squirrel’s throat 

in the night and now I’ll begin in the car with my dad 

float over my childhood and end up an old woman 

aging cheese in a cave here is the song of it 

the mossy rind     dirt in the mouth

the grief-theater where I am the stagehand and 

the actor and the lighting designer    only once was I 

a lighting designer and I knew I’d missed a thing 

I was meant to do but did once by accident 

and that felt lucky enough    lucky enough to arrange 

words on scales to hear how they belong there 

but how    with less performance   sometimes 

when I sit down to write it is like I am lifting 

my fingers to the keys    parts of my life I never touch 

rarely funny or cynical or gruff which means 

it might be a show of certain selves or maybe

the way some of us catch time in our nets 

and press it between the pages of a day or a show 

of the ways life does its little life performance on me 

and I tie a bow there on the moment as it rises 

and falls    I catch before it dissolves or I don’t and grieve 

its dissolving    its not-bow or fail to notice the moment at all 

those gruff and insidious lusters waiting at the gates 

Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of four poetry collections, Foxlogic, Fireweed, Little Spells, James Laughlin Award winner How to Live on Bread and Music, and Salt Memory. Recent awards include a Pushcart Prize, the Terrain Poetry Prize, and the Backwaters Poetry Award. She writes, teaches, and makes literary collages in Redlands, California.

9 January 2023