Jennifer Givhan – Poetry
Breath that moves on water / small boat, small rower
after Louise Erdrich
The carrier brings a dog-
eared Original
Fire to the door
instead of leaving it
in the mailbox
at the corner.
My old boxer girl
who doesn’t know she’s
dying of lung cancer
(the white tumors
snowflaking
her x-rays)
follows
me to the porch,
barking at the knock.
Inside, bookmarked
at “The Ninth Month”
a black & white
four-photo strip
of a woman with her girl,
one scarved, the other not
bald, neither ready for
the first shot, smiling wide
then wider, till finally
mocking gravity
with frowns.
My lost ones,
if I can still praise you,
souls in water,
if nothing leaves
this plain earth, whether
clamped or locked
or unplanned,
then I opened once, too,
carrying a found boat of memory,
& rowed.
Jennifer Givhan was a 2010 Pen Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellow, as well as a 2011 St. Lawrence Book Award finalist and a 2012 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize finalist for her poetry collection. She attends the low-residency MFA program at Warren Wilson College with a graduate fellowship, and has been accepted to attend the 2013 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Fiction. Nominated for the 2012 Best of the Net, Givhan’s work has appeared in over fifty literary journals, including DASH (in which her poem won the 2013 Poetry Prize), Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Rattle, and The Los Angeles Review. You can visit Givhan online athttp://jennifergivhan.com.
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