Again, Again by Jennifer Funk

Not like a tap turned on and not like a match struck

and certainly not like flicking on a light, it is not sudden. 

           

It is barely sweet.  Ripe?  Hard to tell.  Fingers

pressed carefully into the skin, imagine say, a pear, 

           

green, faintly so and tenuous, as though the green

were a blush, as though the pear at the prospect

 

of being plucked from its tree so many weeks ago

flushed a shade that recalls grass dying in the fall

           

or the barest beginnings of scallion stems. 

Sometimes you tell the story in fits, sometimes

           

one line at a time.

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Jennifer Funk is California born and Yankee bred. Told by her mother she came out yowling, she has led an emphatically articulated life all the years since. She has received a BA from Bennington College, an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College, and was a recent recipient of a work-study scholarship for the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her work can be found at ROARfeminist.org and is forthcoming from HorseThief Books' Digital Magazine. If pressed, she would say, perhaps, that her poems endeavor to explore the sinuous possibilities of the sentence and an attempt to manifest the ineffable, sensorial wonder of living inside a female body.