Jennifer K Sweeney

The Little Deaths

The ghosts are all day with us.
Not cartoon roundnesses or bitter haunts
but the stirring upon surfaces
as things let go.
Bellied mouse and husked grasses,
tumbleweed orbs I bundle in late fall.
Whorl of the coyote’s eye as it passes.
We are strangers in our passing but borne
out of a brushed wood I gazed into
moments ago and saw nothing and from that,
the eye
amended the vacancy.
And I thought, I’d seen it before
so familiar as around the old table,
Rose’s eye or Teddy’s eye.
The poem puts on its grief-jacket
to write the poems about death before death
has a shadow, rehearsal when there is not yet
a play. I pull the little deaths close to me.
They are my deaths, they breathe
and lean in like a group of children once
did when I swayed above them
reading a book. The story is short
and when it is over,
they leave and do not close the door.

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Jennifer K Sweeney is the author of four poetry collections: Foxlogic, Fireweed (Backwaters Press/Univ. of Nebraska), Little Spells, How to Live on Bread and Music, which received the James Laughlin Award, the Perugia Press Prize and a nomination for the Poets’ Prize, and Salt Memory. The collaborative chapbook, Dear Question, with L.I. Henley, will be published in 2024 from Glass Lyre Press. The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her poems have appeared widely in journals, most recently or forthcoming in Birdcoat Quarterly, Guesthouse, On the Seawall, OneArt, Orion, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, Terrain, Waxwing.