This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from Burn by Sara Henning (Southern Illinois University Press 2024).
Letter in the Shape of a Banyan Tree
I always felt like a bird blown through the world.
I never felt like a tree.
—Mary Swenson, “Stripping and Putting On”
A year before my birth, Mother, you wished for a son to grow inside you. You’d
call him
banyan tree, strangler fig, boy strong as my father. When I came, you knew
a chickadee starving for love could carry no legacy. Call me
daughter who names creatures of the night like firstborns, daughter persuaded
everything she loved could kill her—possums hissing, their luminous, naked tails.
For consolation, you dressed me in pink, tried to make me your perfect
girl. But I was a tomboy, skinned knees and tangled
hair. Mornings, you’d smoke while braiding me, smooth elastic,
Indigo Girls on the radio. Around my body, the ghost of a son grew.
Jealous, I butchered my Barbies with scissors, played Atari all afternoon—Donkey
Kong, rounds of Frogger in my beanbag chair. Sunlight seethed with me,
lasered our duplex windows. Love meant learning to run.
Mother, where does it end, this story of us?
Nightmares remind me you’ve been gone seven years.
Only now, my prayers are bioluminescent, tractor beams luring your ghost
planet back. But my memory keeps you breathing,
quiet metronome for cicadas flexing their tymbals in the yard. I still talk to you
relentlessly, fevered questions about bodies, children,
secret blood that won’t stop. When will you answer? Aristotle said
time is how we position ourselves relative to change, but I want to believe any
universe flexes like Heteractis aurora, turquoise Beaded Sea Anemone. Space only
valley of muscle, and we are the clownfish slipping through each other to another
world. What is a day without darkness? When tumors clustered your
X-rays, Mother, you became infinite. I am not
your banyan, but I branch and sow. I’m a bird blown through the world. Call me
daughter,
zeroed. I’ll never let you go.
Sara Henning (she/her) is the author of the poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize and the 2019 Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award. She’s a recipient of scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University, where she coordinates the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series.
Layla Lenhardt (she/they) is an American poet. She is founder and Editor-in-Chief of the (currently on hiatus) national literary journal 1932 Quarterly. Her essays, poems, short prose, and interviews have been published across various types of media, including a pickle jar, a post card, and a bathroom stall in Dublin. She is a 2021 Best of the Net Nominee and was a judge for Poetry Super Highway’s Annual Contest in 2022. Her first full-length poetry collection, Mother Tongue, was published by Main Street Rag Publications (2023). She is a 2022 alumna of the SAFTA residency.
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