Jennifer Mills Kerr: Gray Charm and Blossoms, Blemishes

Gray Charm

Winter afternoons, tender and breakable. The iron weight of garden, dark with yew and holly, a creak across my soul. Around me, aged firs, grown aslant –the stress of mountain winds–and purple moors beating, beating. One question leads to another, comfortable music in my mouth. No flowers down the path. A day latticed. Tending silence, a strange consecration.



Sources:
Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, Chapter XXX
Emily Dickinson, He Fumbles at Your Spirit, I Felt a Funeral in my Brain, A Bird Came Down the Walk, There’s a Certain Slant of Light, Pain has an element of Blank
Marly Oliver, Some Questions You Might Ask, When Death Comes

Blossoms, Blemishes

Cool cascades of calla lilies, pre-dawn air. Beyond my mother’s balcony, the scent of rain-drenched acacias. These insistent pavements, spread blue-black, stiff as new jeans. Sequins jitterbug after rain like haphazard stars. Distance, a directionless map: my mother’s bruises closer, copper-colored petals, a sap. I wear this path, and our stories, an orbiting sonnet, floral, fallen, bearing streetlights’ caress.



Sources: Luis Cernuda: Written in Water, Learning to Forget
Evie Shockley: Perched, The Beauties; Third Dimension, Sonnet for the Long Second Act, Rose, Queen, Zeddie

Mixed with my own text