Emily Jahn
Emily Jahn is a Minneapolis based poet, barista, and student teacher with degrees in Biology and Creative Writing from Northwestern University. Her work can be found or is forthcoming in Arcturus, Ligeia, Flare, and others.
A Prayer for the Multiverse
The hoarfrost has come in. The fog which hung,
in gray chenille, the sleeping lakes
only yesterday has stilled the forest down
to the capillaries. Intricate retinal nets
behind my eyes, the forest canopy in winter,
dreamcatchers. The birch like my mother peeling
oranges - their dark crinoline,
the silken shoulders of pines
smooth as April leaves -
they quiet and wax crystal
even as the morning arrives
from such a long way away
to that deep silence. The cold has split
them open to let peaks and valleys of light
flow into December air, twisting a thousand
unlike patterns - a whale breached at last -
that ecstasy - caught dead, encased in the ultimate
photograph: divine, trembling, subzero.
If what knocks could pause like so, for just one beautiful
instant to be for once white lace and diamond,
it would be like kissing every lover
I’ve ever had at once - praying,
with my fingers in their dappled hair,
for so many lives
I never grow again, so loved
out of my skin,
I could wander down every road at once,
and the snow would never melt,
un-latticed, cold over the eaves like the rain’s
clean grace - perfect and gone.
