This selection, chosen by guest editor Layla Lenhardt, is from Burn by Sara Henning (Southern Illinois University Press 2024).
Burn
If middle age has a shape, it would be
the body singing, word by luscious word.
My body’s glory caught in my lungs.
If I could, I would uncry myself,
send my body back to my mother’s womb,
where my father once signed his name
in blood. I hung there, seam
of cells, fixed to my holy order—love’s
microscopic blaze so much like breathing.
My heart, still twined to my mother’s.
Her body, it held me like she hadn’t given up.
I long to be pulled from my mother
some August long ago and lie on her chest,
naked, cord uncut, hair matted to my skull.
I want to fill again the hollow in my mother
death will not take as its house. Teach me,
body, to unscar what is scarred. To cherish
the uncharitable. My breasts, whipped
philosophers. My eyes, a murder of crows.
My thighs are engines, leave traces of fire
as I rise up. Watch me rise up.
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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