Jennifer Polson Peterson

 Jennifer Polson Peterson is a poet living in South Mississippi. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Colorado Review, Radar, Beloit Poetry Journal, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere. She is a Phd candidate at the University of Southern Mississippi's Center for Writers and the author of a chapbook, Must Resemble Leisure, published by Seven Kitchens Press.

Remain

It was a year of fires in wine country.  Another year burning, the far land  

veined with bright, raging bands that worked  a hundred years of dust-to-dust in a single night.  

Mornings fell on neighborhoods turned white  grids of ash; the odd surviving objects  

like antiquities—a dish intact, a child’s toy—  became remarkable. One woman  

lived by jumping in a swimming pool.  Hours she tread water while the red  

and smoke-drowned night  passed over her.  

Daylight found the house  eaten and the fire moved on, her shoes  

half-melted on the deck  just cool enough to wedge her feet in  

and walk out into the dawn flurry of cinder—she a naked Eve  

and this, her newly  unmade world.

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Jennifer Polson Peterson

Remain

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