With the Boy, with Myself

Jennifer Kronovet

He has thoughts he doesn’t
think about. Birds might wake him
but they don’t. My thoughts
feel like speech—how one animal
makes nature—until I speak to him.
We use words like a tree uses light:
there is a process we don’t see but do.

A kid I don’t know hits another
I don’t know. I say stop stop
to myself. Speech keeps
happening against me.
The boy wakes to cry.

Jennifer Kronovet was born and raised in New York City. She received an MFA in creative writing from Washington University in St. Louis and an MA in applied linguistics from Columbia University Teachers College. She is the author of The Wug Test (Ecco, 2016), which was selected by Eliza Griswold for the National Poetry Series, and Awayward (BOA Editions, 2007), which was selected by Jean Valentine as the winner of the A. Poulin Jr. Poetry Prize.

About Jennifer Kronovet

Themes

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Peacock Island

From the island
he saw the castle
 
and from the castle
he saw the island.
 
Some people live
this way—wife/
 
mistress/wife/mistress.
But this story isn’t
 
the one I’m telling.
From the island
 
he saw the castle
and that made him
 
distant from power
and from the castle
 
he saw the island
and that made him distant
 
from imagining
what power can do.
 
The story I’m telling is
the war coming.
 
How can you go from
island to castle to island
 
to castle and not give
birth to a war? No.
 
I still can’t explain it.

Jennifer Kronovet

2018

With the Boy, in the Dark

The boy is interested in black holes
because he doesn’t know how to say
death death death. Just, infinite dark.
Event horizon. Singularity. The boy
teaches me how to mouth the absence
I won’t imagine—the dark keeps going
without time so it can’t hold words.

Jennifer Kronovet

2016

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941)

Whorf worked in insurance, studied the causes of fires in the files: faulty wiring, lack of air spaces, a problem of materials. 

Additional patterns emerged: Workers took great care around gasoline drums, but not around empty gas drums. 

Empty: put your hand in there. Can you feel anything? When the night sky is empty there are still. When the mind is empty there are still. When drums are empty there are still vapors more flammable than gasoline. They are English empty—waiting for the spark.

Jennifer Kronovet

2016

Poems

With the Boy, with Myself

More by this poet

Peacock Island

With the Boy, in the Dark

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941)

Poems

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With the Boy, with Myself

More by this poet

Peacock Island

With the Boy, in the Dark

Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941)

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