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from “Shadow Poems”

The people believed in a future
   with her face—
               Concealed
          her seeds
                        stars’ dull hatchets
               behind the black bark of the moon
        and the whole forest grew
                            when they uttered
the ancestors’ old notion
         that those who have been buried
                   with a little honey
          after marshaling a mournful sound
                              thrown in circular waves to the west
can appropriate similar words
          for Creek, like
                              Rattle-wing—
                    the flower which expresses the fruit.

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.

About Jennifer Foerster

Themes

About this Poem

"This poem is the first in a series of 16 poems entitled, collectively, 'The Shadow Poem,' based on erasures of seven texts written by explorers or Indian agents to Creek Country (present-day Georgia, Alabama, and Florida) from 1527 to 1828. 'The Shadow Poem' is part of a larger work that experiments with form and source material to explore and expose areas of invisibility in landscape and history, specifically that of the Muskogean origins in the American Southeast. This is a poem of questions. How does the imprint of the past on our future generate growth? What threats or masks do faith or hope preserve? As our language transforms with our ecology, what new responsibilities to language should we/could we be more aware of?"
—Jennifer Foerster

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Origin of Planets

In this version, the valley
lime green after rain
rolls its tides before us.

A coyote bush shivers with seed.

We hold out our palms as if catching snow—
our villages of circular tracts
overcast with stars.

Jennifer Foerster

2022

Touring the Earth Gallery

Chicks—dead in a once teeming reef
and a mother bird
scouring ghostly coral.

We dozed, broke our machines.

Extreme heat, intensifying rain
will bring the island states’ collapse,
a fast decline of sea grass.

Our time period is one of
glacial isostatic adjustment.

In the third chamber, dust
daily rearranged into pastoral scenes:

beach strewn with radioactive crustaceans—

“The Woman at Repose
with the Sea Behind Her.”

Jennifer Foerster

2017

The Last Kingdom

Three days before the hurricane
a woman in white is hauling milk.

The beach wails.
She is swinging her pail.

I am sleeping in a tent of car parts, quilts
when the woman passes through the heavy felt door.

If your dream were to wash over the village, she says.
We listen—seagulls resisting the shore.

Hermit crabs scuttle under tin.
The children hitch their sails in.

Later that night from the compound walls
I see her hitchhiking the stars’ tar road—

black dress, black boots, black bonnet,
a moon-faced baby in a basket.

Jennifer Foerster

2017

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from “Shadow Poems”

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