Refrain
by Jennifer Elise Foerster
There is a woman who whistles
from the arroyo—oh hollow bone
you have a body you cannot carry alone.
What I carry beneath an ocean
same color as the sky
is not my own
though I am always yours,
collecting fractals of falling hours,
coral scales for your necklace.
Nightly I fall from my skin
to the surface—glass worms
drift in the trade winds,
sighs of porpoises billow the dunes.
Beneath the swimming Sargassum blooms,
snails’ sapphire wings,
I depend on the rain of the dead for food—
my umbrella, flared, is a fossil.
Oh abyssal fish with telescope eyes,
fish with luminous torches,
where are the whirling Spanish dancers?
Where are my drowned teeth, ear bone, jaw?
A crab marches its marbled shell
across the ocean floor—
as if the body was ensnared
by its own memory.
Body, I drag you like a shipwreck,
pluck the pelican-trampled weeds
from the cracks of the gas-lit shore
to fasten into your hair nest—
and some days can only manage
to sit on the deck with a cigarette
watching the tin clouds rust in the rain,
my fish-shaped bath soaps
bleed into gutters
no longer knowing blue
from blue, flesh from light,
sea from sky. I cannot echo
your absence without dissolving you,
cannot retrieve you from rock
or from sound, nor can I return you.
A freight train carrying last night’s dreams
steams across the in-between
where I wait at the depot catching dust,
holding a suitcase and your clammy hand—
where the eyes of fish
are not windows
but moons the earth
has forgotten. Like a bone
afloat on a darkening sea
the arroyo’s fluted
surface whistles—
Body, have you forgotten me
so soon?
Jennifer Elise Foerster is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and received her MFA from the Vermont College of the Fine Arts. She is the recipient of a NEA Creative Writing Fellowship (2017), a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship (2014), and was a Robert Frost Fellow in Poetry at Breadloaf (2017) and a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford (2008-2010). A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, she teaches at the IAIA MFA Low-Residency Program, and co-directs For Girls Becoming, an arts mentorship program for Mvskoke youth in Oklahoma. Jennifer is the author of Leaving Tulsa, (2013) and Bright Raft int the Afterweather (2018), both published by the University of Arizona Press; "Refrain" first appeared in her most recent book. This spring, she will be completing her PhD in English and Literary Arts at the University of Denver. She lives in San Francisco.
"Where My Dreaming and My Loving Live: Poetry & the Body" is the second annual offering of the Poetry Coalition -- more than twenty organizations nationwide dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and communities, as well as the important contributions poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds. A founder member of the Coalition, Letras Latinas at Notre Dame's Institute's for Latino Studies has partnered with the Best American Poetry blog to present 10 poems by women in March that engage with this year's theme, which borrows a line from U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith's "Flores Woman." The poems in this project were curated by Emma Trelles.
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