A woman thoughtshe saw Christin a tin pail of milkon the barn floorrain outside His faceblue as marblein the predawnmilking what were Hiskeepsakes as a childa stone maybestashed in the dirta conker like onesboys collected forfuel and left rottingin heaps nearrailway stationsduring WWI the casingsreminded Him ofHis mother the shapeher hands madedays she foundher temper—lostwe say—but is thattrue? the woman knewit’s always therein the tree in the limbs’restraint beneaththe shell the solventthe hard darkseed chemists rushedto ferment then sentto trenches mencut from the farmlanda woman sawChrist in the mistfertilizer’s stale scentcome in throughthe eaves come Jesusin the sweethay dampening
The Hawthorn
Shara Lessley
Feature Date
- March 5, 2022
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Copyright © 2021 by Shara Lessley.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Shara Lessley is the author of The Explosive Expert’s Wife, winner of the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize, Two-Headed Nightingale, and co-editor of The Poem’s Country: Place & Poetic Practice, an anthology of essays. A former Stegner Fellow in Poetry at Stanford University, her awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, Washington College’s Mary Wood Fellowship, the Diane Middlebrook Poetry Fellowship from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, Colgate University’s Olive B. O’Connor Fellowship, and a “Discovery”/The Nation prize, among others. Shara’s work has recently appeared in American Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Magma, Bennington Review, IMAGE, and the Best American Poetry 2020 and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Consulting Editor for Acre Books, she lives in Dubai.
Vol. 50/No. 5
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Editor
Elizabeth Scanlon
The American Poetry Review is dedicated to reaching a worldwide audience with a diverse array of the best contemporary poetry and literary prose. APR also aims to expand the audience interested in poetry and literature, and to provide authors, especially poets, with a far-reaching forum in which to present their work.
APR has continued uninterrupted publication of The American Poetry Review since 1972, and has included the work of over 1,500 writers, among whom there are nine Nobel Prize laureates and thirty-three Pulitzer Prize winners.
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