by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

Because you are pregnant
the days grow rounder with light,

long oaks bend towards each other
as through a glass orb—

loose blouses like snow drifts.
I wish I had sung to you more

when you were inside me,
carried you less like the marriage

I knew was failing. I wish I could’ve kept
my mind in the same place as my body.

This year the winter will not drag on.
I will measure the slowly accruing

light in your changing form.
Who knows what settles

as I watch you slice the peaches.
Maybe a future entomologist’s fingers

are finding their first
meticulous rhythm. Maybe the delicate

register of your child’s voice
is gathering its notes.

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Sally Bliumis-Dunn's poems have been published in Paris Review, Poetry London, Plume, SWWIM Every Day, and Poets.org, among others.

by Sally Bliumis-Dunn

From their long white trunks
brighter than winter air,
their dark eyes watching,

motionless, without judgment
as I walk the rough stone driveway.
I know these eyes are wounds

healed over, or scars
from branches lost.
And I know the language

between us is untranslatable.
But for the entire three-mile hike
I sense their eyes behind me

holding me, as I might hold
an over-full glass of water,
meniscus trembling in the winter sky

measuring me as I grow smaller
by the mailbox, letter in my hand.
And though at a great distance

I can feel them taking in
the loops and dips in the black script
of the address and its return,

as I might observe
without distinction wreaths
of moss around their trunks

if I were focusing on something else
or everything at once.

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Sally Bliumis-Dunn teaches Modern Poetry at Manhattanville College and the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Her poems have appeared in New Ohio Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, PLUME, Poetry London, The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, upstreet, The Writer’s Almanac, Academy of American Poets’ “poem-a-day” series, and Ted Kooser’s column, among others. In 2002, she was a finalist for the Nimrod/Hardman Pablo Neruda Prize. Sally Bliumis-Dunn’s third full-length collection, Echolocation, was published by Plume editions/MadHat Press in March 2018.