blue skies poetry

early sun limns
the plate rail     a kitchen
reduced to grit & shambles
       butcher block table
       wallpaper slumped about its knees


light here reveals 
only     absence


teasel in the bones of
the victory garden     thrusting
barrel staves like iron ribs


what we have come for


lilacs pressing in
these diamond panes      their blossom
stark & fragrant across the hearth
      rainwater shifting in
      the stair’s curved spine


how this land holds everything & 
nothing     back

~ Jenna Butler

Jenna Butler is an educator, book reviewer, editor and poet. Her work has won a number of awards and has been widely published in literary magazines, journals and anthologies in North America and Europe. She has edited nineteen collections of poetry in Canada and England, and is currently working toward a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing from the University of East Anglia, UK. Her new collection of poems, Forcing Bloom, is scheduled for release by Mercutio Press in 2007. Butler lives in Edmonton, Alberta with her husband, where she is the founding editor of Rubicon Press.

Filed under: Jenna Butler, Writing the Land by akublik Date 2 October, 2007