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.
Pentimento by Jenny Molberg | Sandalwood Poetry Reed Diffuser
$15.00Price
Jenny Molberg is the author of three poetry collections: Marvels of the Invisible (Tupelo Press, 2017), winner of the Berkshire Prize; Refusal (LSU Press, 2020); and The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023), a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her fourth poetry collection, The Medium, is forthcoming from LSU Press in 2027. She edited the Unsung Masters volume Adelaide Crapsey: On the Life and Work of an American Master, and her poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, The American Poetry Review, AGNI, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere.
