Relic
An atlas
on the underside of my dream.
My half-shut eyelid—
a black wing.
I dipped sharp quills
in the night’s mouth—
moths swarmed
from my throat.
I pulled a feather blanket
over my skeleton
and woke—
a map of America
flapping in the dark.
Once I dreamt
of inheriting this—
my mother
who still follows crows
through the field,
my sister’s small hand
tucked inside hers,
me on her breast
in a burial quilt.
Copyright © 2015 by Jennifer Foerester. Used with permission of the author.
Jennifer Foerster
Jennifer Elise Foerster is the author of The Maybe-Bird (The Song Cave, 2022); Bright Raft in the Afterweather (University of Arizona Press, 2018); and Leaving Tulsa (University of Arizona Press, 2013). A member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation of Oklahoma, Foerster has received a Lannan Foundation Writing Residency Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, and a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in Poetry at Stanford University.