You understood
nothing
except the piece
of yourself
you tore out of us
and tossed at the fault line
beating like a heart.
I built this poem
around the jagged wound,
refired in the kiln of a sun
who heard my
silent bleeding
and wept aloud
for the breaking you had done.
© 2025 Jennifer Wagner
dVerse Poetics: Building from the Broken
They say there’s much you can do with
stale bread.
Panzanella, bruschetta, crostini.
Croutons, bread pudding.
How like spring,
new and fresh, it goes quickly,
and then, the blistering oven
of summer is here.
But, how do you salvage a poem, like sunrise,
so fleeting you can never seem to catch it in time?
Like manna.
Here and gone.
I saw it today, etched into the glass of a window
with an epitaph:
Your wings were ready, but my heart was not.
I see how it is.
I glimpsed you briefly, soft-robed phantom,
boarding a train to somewhere else,
orphaned, like my last vanished poem,
not a breadcrumb in sight,
on into the starry night.
© 2025 Jennifer Wagner
"Your wings were ready, but my heart was not." - Amelia Hutchins
When you just don’t jot it down in time. Know the feeling? Maybe it will return, when it, and I, am ready. ;)
The whip snake came
looking for black-throated sparrows
in the cholla,
twisting her braided scales
around the palo verdes
and catclaws.
She was nervous, though, and hungry,
and it was nearing night.
She didn’t notice
the minor shift on the limb
of a grandaddy saguaro,
so busy was she hissing and striking
at anything that moved,
mouth gaping like a blood red tulip.
A quick and seasoned cactus wren,
with irises glittering and peeled on the scrub below,
shuttled her brood
into their own sleepy hollow
in the arm of the saguaro—
and tipclawed out again
to watch the night feast.
Silent horseman of the desert,
the great horned owl, swooped
and gripped that whip
like a coachman
severing the spine in his talon.
Mrs. Wren Marple thought to herself,
I didn’t even have to miss Fallon!
I’m always in the wrong place at the right time—
I saw all this before Law & Order at nine!
© 2025 Jennifer Wagner
For Shay’s Word Garden Word List
And that’s a wrap, folks! Thirty poems in 30 days for National Poetry Month were sometimes a heavy task, even for an armchair detective, so today I had to go light!