Collage
Pentimento
Come into compulsion, you tell me. Listen
to the dread, its multiple iterations. Unsteady
my collective weeping in this strange time of day.
Seemed somewhere. Wild the coyotes and close.
I stopped and the tree said surviving the surviving
is all there is. Like any writer failing, a familiar question
ate my gut. Welcome the woods of one hundred
years ago, where from my body I retched a bad man.
From my hand, a spider returns to the leaves like a wolf,
apricot-sized. Dread scratches its wooden lightning,
the forest clawing utterances before me. You say:
survive everything in the past. Then survive this.
Jenny Molberg'S third poetry collection, The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023), was a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. An NEA fellow, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, AGNI, The Missouri Review, The Kenyon Review, The Rumpus, The Adroit Journal, Oprah Quarterly, and other publications. She is a Professor and Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Central Missouri, where she edits Pleiades: Literature in Context.