The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Foxlogic, Fireweed by Jennifer K. Sweeney

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Bat Milk

They do, they do— 

inside the living mountain 

where night is a constant— 

curl up like a god’s 

shuttered eye 

and wait as I waited 

body of my body 

we sing the same 

blood-warm song. 

Casements wrapped in ink 

they are to themselves 

the center of the earth 

by which all things 

distinguish 

though still they may ask 

as I have asked 

staring across 

the battered plain 

what monster what 

monster am I? 

Midwife of shadow 

the first milk breath 

hums in the mineral sky.

This selection comes from Foxlogic, Fireweed, available from The Backwaters Press. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Kimberly Ann Priest.

Jennifer K. Sweeney is the author of three other poetry collections, including Little Spells, How to Live on Bread and Music, and Salt Memory. The recipient of the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of American Poets and a Pushcart Prize, she teaches at the University of Redlands in California. Twitter: @jksweeneypoet Kimberly Ann Priest is the author of Slaughter the One Bird (Sundress 2021), Parrot Flower (Glass 2021), Still Life (PANK 2020), and White Goat Black Sheep (Finishing Line Press 2018). Winner of the New American Press 2019 Heartland Poetry Prize, her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as North Dakota Quarterly, Salamander, Slipstream, The Berkeley Poetry Review, Borderland and many others. She is an associate poetry editor for the Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry and Embody reader for The Maine Review. Find her work at kimberlyannpriest.com.