Vantage Point by BEE LB
Barren
Jennifer Keith
said of dirt “too poor to produce much or any…”
no clay feet: airborne in a dust devil
no place for light
or holding water,
was the bitter climate without or within?
some curse, tear-salted.
all that survived was that hollow thing called potential,
swelling, with a life of its own
to monstrous proportions,
its agonies screaming for attention
throwing bloody, broken tomatoes
at what a long-dead voice
still calls failure.
Jennifer Keith’s poems have appeared in Sewanee Theological Review, The Free State Review, Fledgling Rag, Unsplendid, Best American Poetry 2015, JMWW, and elsewhere. Keith was a finalist in the 2021 Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace. Her first full-length book of poems, Terminarch, won the 2023 Able Muse Book Award. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland where she plays bass for the rock band Batworth Stone.
BEE LB is an array of letters, bound to impulse; a writer creating delicate connections. they have called any number of places home; currently, the space beneath a collapsed ceiling on unceded Anishinaabe land in Michigan. they have been published in FOLIO, Figure 1, The Offing, and Harpur Palate, among others. their portfolio can be found at twinbrights.carrd.co and they can be found at patreon.com/twinbrights