EYE OF MILTON

by Jennifer Davis Michael

O Hell, hello, an O of grief:

the eye of Hurricane Milton 

spends its wide wrath,

darkening the world.

Climatology a talent

useless against false shepherds

swollen with profane wind.

 

Once the blind poet

rose from the pool of Styx,

invoking holy light

to flood his song. “Blind mouths,” 

he called those sham prophets

while he still had sight.

The contrary: the muteness of an eye.

Jennifer Davis Michael is a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. She is the author of two chapbooks, both from Finishing Line Press: Let Me Let Go (2020) and Dubious Breath (2022). Her poem "Forty Trochees" was selected by Rachel Hadas for the Frost Farm Prize in Metrical Poetry (2020). She has published several poems previously in The New Verse News.

A RUMOR OF WAR

by Jennifer Davis Michael

Jennifer Davis Michael is a professor of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee. Her work has appeared previously in The New Verse News and in such journals as Think, NELLE, Raintown Review, and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature. She is the author of the chapbook Let Me Let Go (Finishing Line Press, 2020), and another, Dubious Breath, forthcoming this year.

THE STAIRS, THE BED, THE LAUGHTER

by Jennifer Davis Michael

Drawing by Ann Telnaes, The Washington Post, December 5, 2017 

The stairs, the bed, the laughter,
the hand over her mouth.
The silence that came after
the stairs, the bed, the laughter;
the faces that looked past her.
The mockery, the doubt.
The stairs, the bed, the laughter.
Fifty hands over her mouth.

Jennifer Davis Michael is Professor and Chair of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN. Her work has appeared in a number of journals, including Mezzo Cammin, Southern Poetry Review, Turtle Island Quarterly, Leaping Clear, and previously in TheNewVerse.News.

THE BORDER FAR AWAY

by Jennifer Davis Michael





My son is white like me, the border far away.
According to his papers and my scar
where forceps dragged him earthward, he is mine.
We don’t discuss what’s happening down there
—I mean, down at the border. He’s just six.
He’s learning how to swim. A patient guard
shapes his flailing dog-paddle to a stroke
that might cross rivers. She lightly pins his feet
to bend his body to a diving arc.

“Far away from home, it looks like darkness”:
his random comment on the vegetation
we speed past on the way back from the pool.
He sleeps that night, surfacing only once
from nightmares of the house crumbling around us.
I guard the borders of his innocence,
my trigger-finger on the remote control.

Jennifer Davis Michael is Professor and Chair of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, TN. Her poems have appeared previously in TheNewVerse.News and also in Mezzo Cammin, Literary Mama, Cumberland River Review, and Southern Poetry Review, among others. 

TRUMPET MINISTRATIONS*

by Jennifer Davis Michael




Perhaps the application
of an ear trumpet

to amplify the cries
of a ravaged nation.

Or the sounding of a blast
heralding the doom
of democracy,
the triumph of bombast.

The ancient shofar
has yielded to tweets—
“My button is bigger”—
braying for war.

Jericho town
had beautiful walls
until Joshua bugled
and they all fell down.

John of Patmos heard seven
trumpets, unrolling
the scrolls of apocalypse,
unveiling heaven.

Our manacled minds
check Facebook and hope
for Shelleyan prophecy:
can spring be far behind?


*After mishearing the phrase “Trump administration” on the radio.

Jennifer Davis Michael is professor and chair of English at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, specializing in British Romanticism. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Poetry Reviw, Cumberland River Review, Literary Mama, and Mezzo Cammin, among others. She has also published a book of criticism, Blake and the City (Bucknell, 2006).