stay

 

you ask me to

and i don’t know how to answer

 

i want to

know

 

what it’s like to stay

now

 

so much

in that look

 

my cells

multiplying

 

like time-lapse

photosynthesis

 

curling myself

around that

 

one

word

 

as if

light

 

 

© 2024 Jennifer Wagner

 

hither

i come

 

swept into

the tidal wave of you

 

mashed up

on this ocean floor

 

how do you undo me

like this

 

my gift

in a dizzy hand

 

my eyes

a vulnerable sigh, a sail

 

on the blue

of this paper world, folded

 

into the perpetual

burning

 

churning

the wheel of us

 

together,

marooned

 

 

© 2024 Jennifer Wagner

 

word garden word list

 

Blue Bird

 

The shell cage inside me

swings with a haunted bird,

eyes wide

mid-molting that never completes.

 

The cage door is open,

but what use is flying

when the sky is broken.

 

Can you hear the

humiliation, grief, and shame

in her song?

 

Job and God say,

beware your “friends.”

They pretend to be with you

but just want to fix you

 

when they should

break their own harps, their harmonicas,

smash their own guitars,

 

and just let her sing.

 

 

© 2024 Jennifer Wagner

Coyote

 

Today I write poems.

The hard ones.

The worst and best to write.

 

Regret at how I hurt you

as you were so little

while my fears were so big

and so looming.

 

I am sorry.

I am fool enough to think

these words may be enough.

 

Looking out the window

at the fog that got us both,

I know this is how you, feel, too—

lost, unseeing.

 

I don’t know when you will understand

and shake off your winter coat

and run, orange fur escaping into the sun

and meadows I kept you from.

Go now, I pray.

 

Your bruisings I will hold in my heart, I hope,

if allowed,

so you may be free

 

from this tumbleweed field

where I birthed you,

where my eyelashes are becoming weighted down

by dust.

 

Go, go, and remember the best of us.

 

 

© 2024 Jennifer Wagner