From Which the Method of Drawing in Space between the Trees Instead of the Trees Themselves Might Well Be Employed

← v14n1, Spring 2015

You with that fat blade of grass pressed between thumbs, whistling

as if your life depended on it.

You who carried three ideas up into the aspen stand, and kept forgetting two of them.

What remained were the faces of Saudi children

who survived the wedding tent fire.

They arrived in Galveston, wrapped in loose white bark, black eyes darting. I see them

every time the aspen shiver.

Touching one now, a scold of blue jays lifts.

I know cheatgrass, sweet mallow and the cough pellet a magpie leaves. I know the snap when wood burns fast and hot.

You who were supposed to teach them your words for birthday, terror, milk.

Your life depended on it.

One of their names meant fragrant in Arabic.

The god of wind traveling from the southwest was by the Greeks called Lips.

You could say they were all eyes. Exactly, repeated the aspens, exactly.

war childhood memory

Jenny Browne

Jenny Browne is the author of three collections of poems from University of Tampa Press: Dear Stranger (2013), The Second Reason (2007), and At Once (2003). Her poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review , Tin House , The Threepenny Review , and The New York Times . Browne has received fellowships from the James Michener Center for Writers, the Writers’ League of Texas, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She was selected by the University of Iowa International Writing Program and the US Department of State to teach poetry in Sierra Leone and Kenya in 2012. Browne teaches English at Trinity University. Photo by Marks Moore