The West Review
  • Home
  • About
    • About
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Contact
    • Masthead
  • Current Issue
  • Shop
    • Bookstore
    • Subscriptions
  • Archives
  • Blog

self-portrait as winter gazebo, BY SARA HENNING

                         Madison, South Dakota

What do you call it,
when snow muscles into
the shingles,

clenches there until
heat takes it? Marriage.
If light enters ice,

ghost-like, it arrows
back. Once, azaleas
swung from these

ceiling joists. The air,
haunted with petals.
Now icicle lights

flash their fiery
mercy. Christmas wreaths
hang like iridescent

fruit. Once, gussied up
in lace, I fell into us.
Azalea musk. Desire,

I thought, could
scissor us into one body.
Now, wind-lashed,

we lean on rails.
Our shadows entangle,
make love
​
in the snow,
as if love could
bruise us beautiful.



NEXT
Sara Henning is the author of View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), co-winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award. Winner of the 2019 High Plains Book Award, it has been short listed by Jacar Press for the 2018 Julie Suk Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in poetry to the 2019 Sewanee Writers' Conference. Henning teaches writing at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she also serves as poetry editor for Stephen F. Austin State University Press.
  • Home
  • About
    • About
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Contact
    • Masthead
  • Current Issue
  • Shop
    • Bookstore
    • Subscriptions
  • Archives
  • Blog