Jennifer Loyd

Rachel Carson: Genealogy

Everything rations. But her great-great-
grandmother’s laugh—a watercourse—rough, flirting
with the shore, stopping short of flood.

Another ancestor dug in, the Alleghenies,
springs in the hillside.
Grim though magic.

A great-grandmother, hands magnolia-
white in an infirmary under the stairs,
healed wild indignant cardinals.

Her grandmother disowned the sea, warned of danger in
the cold shine. Buzz-cut her hair, a dead husband’s razor.

One day she will want what they once wanted—
azaleas, and to be naked in a field,

or nothing.

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Jennifer Loyd is a 2020/2021 Stadler Fellow. She holds an MFA from Purdue University, where she was managing editor for Sycamore Review. She has also served as a senior editor for Copper Nickel. Her poems and prose, which explore the intersection between the private voice and public narratives, have appeared in The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, Natural Bridge, New South, Colorado Gardener and elsewhere. For now, she resides in Colorado.