by Jennifer Sutherland

By late afternoon the wind scrambles down
the bluff but the warmer air resists, trapped 
in the hollow behind the house. We try opening 
and closing all the windows until a shutter loosens 
and then tumbles onto the grass. We leave 
it lying where it fell. The wet will warp the wood 
the same, however way they meet each other. We 
won’t be here to nail it up come March, we’re 
turning the place over to the bank, that’s what both 
of us are thinking even if we haven’t said as much so far. 
Jingle mail, it’s called, for the sound made when 
the paper hits the mailroom floor. Still, it is December, 
after all, I owe us both a little something like festivity, 
and I drag a cardboard box down from the attic 
onto the porch, remove a wreath. It smells 
of mildewed plastic and, very faintly, oranges. 
Years ago I pinned a red and yellow ribbon onto 
the loop of phony pine, and there it’s stayed, wilting 
like a belle in rotten weather. By tonight the temperature 
will dip again, the season seeks its equilibrium. 
And we’ll close ourselves up in the house for good, wait 
inside for the letter that we’ve been told comes certified. 
I brush away a cobweb overhead. And then a damselfly, 
who must have only yesterday emerged, you can thank 
the thaw, while I was fiddling with this synthetic frippery, 
descends behind me, stills her wings. It would be cruel 
to let a creature like her starve, bright green coruscating 
foundling, she should have gone on sleeping in the marsh. 
And what will she eat, with so many months left to pass 
in slow-moving time before another equanimity of light 
and darkness? I crush her underfoot.

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Jennifer Sutherland's first book, Bullet Points, is forthcoming from River River books in June, 2023. Her work has recently appeared or will soon appear in Hopkins Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, I-70 Review, Appalachian Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore on the unceded land of the Piscataway and Susquehannock peoples.

by Jennifer Sutherland

Twilight, and I hear

her voice, familiar

kettle-hiss.

Quiet, girl,

she commands; then

my childhood rooms

are here, each

one dark as pitch,

bulls-eyed, red-

end cigaretted.

In the center

Mother sits,

seething.

Labyrinthine lady

fulcrum : rattle

preening. Tiny

importuning click/

click/click of gas

as she warms

the morning’s

coffee, aluminum

saucepan tap

and pour. Snap

of air trapped inside

her. Cricket clatter.

The house, its grid

of trenches, of gangrene

and defilade,

unacknowledged.

Rainbow-sheen halo

of puff and smoke,

her whisper-drab

devotional,

her pieta. Membrane

contracting, clutching

fibrous wall

and sinew.

Lung, spasming 

and black,

immobile,

wheeze and block.

I must

have frailed her,

asked too much

of her thin-stretched

décolletage,

engendered

a reaction.

When she died the

aperture swelled to many times

its anxious size.

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Jennifer Sutherland is a mostly former attorney and current MFA student at Hollins University, where she is also an assistant poetry editor for the Hollins Critic. Her work has appeared in the Northern Virginia Review and Anomaly, among other places, and her poem, “An Elegant Variation,” won Streetlight's 2018 Poetry Contest.