"Shelter of Lies" by Jen Karetnick from JET FUEL REVIEW

Shelter of Lies
After Shadow Puppet Theater by Johanna Altmann

This is the yellow scrapbook that you began the year I was born
the way one would dig into a planet and forget the word light.
Let us consider the view. Carved and dressed up like puppets,
the dancers leap and catch into the sheet, into the roofbeam,
into the dumb prayer. The architecture of the sky with eagles, finches,
flickers, seagulls. Flying dogs or the breath of dolphins. Each mouth
opens wide as a milk cup, waiting like a cave of bees, as uninvolved
as warm starfish. You stand in your elastic case, the survivor bulging
with life. Your flames still bite my thigh, the shadow marks my bone.
Sweet weight, who inked you in? All night dark wings flopping in my heart.

An Anne Sexton ekocento
Source poems:
"All My Pretty Ones;" "Crossing the Atlantic;" "From the garden;" "Wallflower;" "The Ambition Bird;" "The Double Image;" "Her Kind;" "Ke 6-8018;" "Sylvia's Death;" "Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound;" "O Ye Tongues;" "The Room of My Life;" "Woman with Girdle;" "The House" Menstruation at Forty;" "Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward;" "In Celebration of My Uterus"

Copyright © 2025 Jen Karetnick All rights reserved
from Jet Fuel Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission

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