“Warn the Young Ones” by Jennifer Givhan (poetry, ’15)

A poem by Jennifer Givhan (poetry, ’15) appears in Blackbird:

Warn the Young Ones

First war       She polishes the spine of her own
flesh       Tethered nerve strangling cord       She

burial mounds      She rituals        She
cornstalks in rustling fields        Nothing tribe

nothing sex      Rock for riverbed      Notched
with flint     Second war      She needs less      Sequoia

burns      Cities       In her body      wrappings
of bodies      She debates running       She debates peeling

skin     She stops debating      begins praying without
knees     Not for rain      Prays rain       Holy nothing

. . . continue reading here.