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. |
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.