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Day 13: Photograph by Jenny George

Queer Poem-a-Day is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include adult language. 

Photograph

by Jenny George

In the photograph, she is wearing a white dress.
Eyelets all down the front: little weepholes.
She is standing under the blooming theater
of an apricot tree, looking out from her not-knowing,
her being-alive. A strong sunlight
draws out the dark from under both eyes.
Now, what occurred is inevitable.
Like a water jar filled to the brim with water,
not one drop of space exists for any other
eventuality. Each spring the fruit trees
stage this same party, white garlands shedding
their blossoms all over the garden.
What is going to happen? She would seize my arm
in the dead of night. The story ends
with a wedding. Then everyone endures.


Copyright © 2019 by Jenny George, originally published in the Massachusetts Review.


About the Author

Author headshotJenny George is the author of The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon Press, 2018). She is also a winner of the “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize and a recipient of fellowships from The Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lannan Foundation, the MacDowell Colony, and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Narrative, Granta, Iowa Review, FIELD, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. Jenny lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy.

Queer Poem a Day graphic

Queer Poem a Day


Queer Poem-a-Day is directed by poet and teacher Lisa Hiton and Dylan Zavagno, Adult Services Coordinator at the Deerfield Public Library. Music for this second year of our series is the first movement, Schéhérazade, from Masques, Op. 34, by Karol Szymanowski, performed by pianist Daniel Baer. Queer Poem-a-Day is supported by generous donations from the Friends of the Deerfield Public Library and the Deerfield Fine Arts Commission.

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