Sudden Prose Reprints: "The Objectless Place, an Ether Twist" by Jennifer Militello

The Objectless Place, an Ether Twist

The no one in my experience is the no one with a finger on the trigger, with a hand on the gun, the nothing that has happened since the cedar mill burned down and some places escaped within its sootblack source.  The lack of a village infects us.  The no one I envision could rip my heart out and does not suffer with organs himself.  The father I have never met but whose profile I recognize when it comes together in the cellar of my eye from the little pieces washed ashore of me bit by bit.  His ache in the algae, his mind the smashed syringe.  The strength of his jaw in the wash of sand.  The closed pores of his daily lack of speech gleam beautifully in any light.  The other side of a bottomless, teething lake is not impossible.  The geese are not already extinct.  It is not the bare trees that make me wish for the many avenues of music, but the knowing that they will grow leaves again until no longer double-jointed, until all the choices are no longer frightening, until they seem one green grasp when I imagine they exist.

Jennifer Militello

A Flinch of Song (Tupelo, 2009)

Jennifer Militello is the author of Flinch of Song, winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award, Body Thesaurus, forthcoming from Tupelo Press, and the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail. Her poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Best New Poets 2008. She can be found online at www.jennifermilitello.com. You can purchase Flinch of Song from Amazon in the UK (I couldn't find it at any of the independents I tried) or Powell's in the US.

Sudden Prose Reprints: "Identity Narrative" by Jennifer Militello

Identity Narrative

Do not eat from October’s black hand, O my situation.

Are you still.  Listen.  Innocence: a seam to be stitched or split with a throw of omens.  I lay me down, my soul to keep.  I have sown my amen in the earth.

Sometimes, I live in the open.  My heartbeat a lamb, my heartbeat I am bleeding from the mouth a heartbroken rain.  The thin inches time will give me winter as I stand and watch.  The small in me has anthems made of time’s mouth made of thousands of beads.

I will read my more childish self to sleep.  She will use locusts only for as long as they robe the fields with the feeding they were meant for.  She will nest where bats nest, set curtains to burning, place a marker beside my name so that I might return.

Her heart, made of shale, lies in the mouth of a pious man.  Its verses are stalls that keep the wind ceaseless.  Its lamps cry light in the shape of young lovers as they two-step through the four rooms of God.

Jennifer Militello

A Flinch of Song (Tupelo, 2009)

Jennifer Militello is the author of Flinch of Song, winner of the Tupelo Press First Book Award, Body Thesaurus, forthcoming from Tupelo Press, and the chapbook Anchor Chain, Open Sail. Her poems have appeared in The Kenyon Review, The New Republic, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Best New Poets 2008. She can be found online at www.jennifermilitello.com. 


You can purchase Flinch of Song, her first collection, from Amazon in the UK (I couldn't find it at any of the independents I tried) or Powell's in the US.