Jennifer Loyd

Rachel Carson: Juvenalia

Over breakfast Mother reads to us
the papers                    their Sunday words

Turkish / unburied / field / soldiers.

A popular metaphor (soldier)
and I am training—
for what?         I write poems with pilots,
not questions.

Parents encourage asking but only about certain things.

The radio warbles a word        Dardanelles,
and I move on an inner map.

It’s lonely, but the only work.

People are being killed over words, and I don’t know how
to take them
any less seriously.        General / enters / Allenby / Aleppo.

In the woods, I wonder-train—
fern’s articulated blade
verbena’s umbrella
sweet gum’s inquisition.

Vines query
a trunk’s tender architecture—

Questions have a largess          I want.

The Union Jack hoisted above Basra.

A blockade, by definition, stops the flow
of bread        on the same earth that grows vines
thicker than a soldier’s arm.

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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.