by Jennifer Greenberg

After the summer’s geography
of bodies, you are ribbed
seashell

stripped to moonlight,
mistaken for nautilus,
the antediluvian

Venus carved from her own bone.
Those tight-lipped mammary
cells abandoned, sour

milk in the sand, hot oceans
to undress in, and all
my fantasies buxom.

When the waves split
their tongues, I lie naked
in the surf and wait

for a second adolescence;
for bud-tipped breasts
to unearth

miniatures of mountain—
bluff, bulwark, weathered
arches carved teat to teat.

This is what’s left of God’s clay,
the unmolded archetype,
a female animal

undone, her gills turned to lungs
and set to walk upright
in the waning flood.

Those who see you will say prairie,
but you are hearth. They say empty,
but I say flower—

all petal, pistil, stem of you
bursting for touch.

______________________________________________________________________

Jennifer Greenberg is a Floridian poet living in New England, and an associate editor for the South Florida Poetry Journal. Her writing appears in several online publications and was awarded the Joe Bolton Poetry Award in 2020.

by Jennifer Greenberg

She could have meant the light that falls
in the west, or a bird catapulting himself east
when she told me the story of a boy
leaving me for the empty sky. The night
she asked where babies come from, I told her
the truth: how they come to find bodies
inside our bodies, how they bubble
out of fat and shed their mother’s skin. Some
only visit—like sun spokes through a rainbow,
temporary, too weary to make the trip.
She might have meant we are all brothers
in this life. The dying light, the innocent bird.
I could have said, No, I've never met that soul,
just heard his name in my sleep. But I didn't
correct my daughter when she said, My brother
goes up there, motioning her hands
into a piece of ribbon unfurling up
and up above us, then floating away
like a balloon, buoyant, bodiless.

Jennifer Greenberg is a Florida native pursuing a Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Writing at the University of Central Florida. When not at the office, Jennifer enjoys writing in her sleep and jazz. Her words have been featured in Literary Mama, Homology Lit, Sonder Midwest, and Chomp, and are forthcoming in Coffin Bell.