Jane Satterfield

Epistle with Luggage and Large Bouquet

Phrases drawn from Julia Voznesenskaya’s Letters of Love: Women Political Prisoners in Exile and the Camps

Candles were flickering, music
            was chosen,
I was leaving with a large bouquet,

a translation, a banned Western book.
Simultaneously
one by one, dreams from the day before

began making their way
back to me.
Scarlet tulips, a scrap of bed sheet,

dogs barking in the forbidden zone.
What motives
explain special forms, investigators,

letters torn from school exercise
books,  leaves
from a diary covered over in ink

cutting off paragraphs where captives
give greetings,
the reasons they were imprisoned

and how? Reading one
thing, I forget
another, dousing in cold water as if

I were still floating about in a fabulous
long skirt and
lace. Quiet nooks elsewhere won’t

remind you how a film ends if
you’re living from
one amnesty to the next. Cue

the flood gates,
potatoes and
protest, the city standing in line

for sandbags. It sounds simple
enough. Think
about it and sharpen your pencils.

Such ferocity in that bonfire
of ours:
a poppy sways in a field.

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Jane Satterfield has received awards in poetry from the NEA, Bellingham Review, Ledbury Poetry Festival, Mslexia and more. Her books of poetry are Her Familiars, Assignation at Vanishing Point, Shepherdess with an Automatic, and Apocalypse Mix, winner of the 2016 Autumn House Poetry Prize, selected by David St. John. New poems have appeared in Birmingham Poetry Review, Ecotone, Hopkins Review, Interim, Nelle, Orion and elsewhere. She is married to poet Ned Balbo and lives in Baltimore.