Tag: sweeter water

Wardrobe Best Dressed: Sara Henning’s “How She Loved Me”

How She Loved Me

Before his suicide, my father gave my mother
two Pointillist landscapes. Flowers were rushes
of color, marred dirty bodies, bees dovetailed
to where soft and terrible is the same pithy center.
Before his suicide, she wanted his apology pressed
onto her heart like an iris. On it she wanted him
to write the words fuckup, spindrift, she wanted
learn to forgive. On my twelfth birthday, instead
of teaching me how a man loves a woman, she gave
me a copy of Anais Nin’s Delta of Venus.
On my thirteenth, a book about venereal disease.
Penises luscious with herpes sores perched across
the pages, wet plucked birds. She said, no boy
could touch me until he dropped his pants
in front of her, so I’d learn to hide what I loved,
so I’d learn to want her apology pressed onto
my heart like a spray of oleander, on it the words
sunder, daughter, bitter indictment, something to hold
at the end of my sorrow: sorry he left us without flowers.
Sorry he’s never coming back.

 

 

“How She Loved Me” appeared in Sara Henning’s collection, A Sweeter Water, available from Lavender Ink. Purchase your copy today!

Sara Henning is the author of the full-length collection of poetry A Sweeter Water (2013), as well as a chapbook, To Speak of Dahlias (2012). Her poetry, fiction, interviews and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Willow Springs, Bombay Gin and the Crab Orchard Review. Currently a doctoral student in English and Creative Writing at the University of South Dakota, she serves as Managing Editor for The South Dakota Review.

This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected by Erin Elizabeth Smith. Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the author of two full-length collections, The Fear of Being Found (Three Candles Press 2008) and The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake Press 2011). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Mid-American, 32 Poems, Zone 3, Gargoyle, Tusculum Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She teaches a bit of everything in the English Department at the University of Tennessee and serves as the managing editor of Sundress Publications and Stirring.

Wardrobe Best Dressed: Sara Henning’s “Most Home”

Most Home

Walls with your alibi,
make me sieve.

Between this winter that stains
and the mouth of winter,

hold me colorless,
hold me white tulip.

I want the birds submissive,
like I want the sun

to dress me in its duration,
like I want to lay my hands

on the afternoon and remove
its mask, hurt animal,

understand its human
sound.

 

“Most Home” appeared in Sara Henning’s collection, A Sweeter Water, available from Lavender Ink. Purchase your copy today!

Sara Henning is the author of the full-length collection of poetry A Sweeter Water (2013), as well as a chapbook, To Speak of Dahlias (2012). Her poetry, fiction, interviews and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Willow Springs, Bombay Gin and the Crab Orchard Review. Currently a doctoral student in English and Creative Writing at the University of South Dakota, she serves as Managing Editor for The South Dakota Review.

This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected by Erin Elizabeth Smith. Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the author of two full-length collections, The Fear of Being Found (Three Candles Press 2008) and The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake Press 2011). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Mid-American, 32 Poems, Zone 3, Gargoyle, Tusculum Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She teaches a bit of everything in the English Department at the University of Tennessee and serves as the managing editor of Sundress Publications and Stirring.

Wardrobe Best Dressed: Sara Henning’s “How We Love”

How We Love
—National Geographic wild life cameraman John Varty captures Manana, a wild African leopard, in an unprecedented ritual of mourning

While the mother leopard foraged, a python lured her cub into its throat. When she found the den empty, python slow with new architecture, she tore until it surrendered the body black with digestive fluid, whole as she’d left him, barely dead. Last summer in Illinois, a woman was found under a pile of trash, her animals eating what was left of her. Neighbors said when her husband died, she stopped letting go of what passed through her hands. Even the leopard carried the cub’s body to a field close to her den, chewed it tenderly to pieces, swallowed each down. Even I still look for your effigy everywhere, practice your body until it is raw susurration, burned not by my throat but my heart. Which of us stays at her guttural refrain for days, though our love was never so close to our hunger? What is love but a set of urges? Hold the nape of the neck just so—carry the pieces of the body just so—

 

“How We Love” appeared in Sara Henning’s collection, A Sweeter Water, available from Lavender Ink. Purchase your copy today!

 

Sara Henning is the author of the full-length collection of poetry A Sweeter Water (2013), as well as a chapbook, To Speak of Dahlias (2012). Her poetry, fiction, interviews and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Willow Springs, Bombay Gin and the Crab Orchard Review. Currently a doctoral student in English and Creative Writing at the University of South Dakota, she serves as Managing Editor for The South Dakota Review.

 

This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected by Erin Elizabeth Smith. Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the author of two full-length collections, The Fear of Being Found (Three Candles Press 2008) and The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake Press 2011). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Mid-American, 32 Poems, Zone 3, Gargoyle, Tusculum Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She teaches a bit of everything in the English Department at the University of Tennessee and serves as the managing editor of Sundress Publications and Stirring.

Wardrobe Best Dressed: Sara Henning’s “Afterthought”

Afterthought

If I twine loss with what loses,
I get disappearing, bones of doves

who once ate the evening’s marrow
and became stars,

ate until their hearts stopped
and recited the wild strawberries

of their stopping, and these birds shone
like elevators climbing a shaft

toward the indelibility
of my heart rejecting itself,

the perfumed light of its image
flying raw.

The sunset’s dialect escapes
in hushed drawls:

shhhh, mmmm, shhhh, a triptych.

“Afterthought” appeared in Sara Henning’s collection, A Sweeter Water, available from Lavender Ink. Purchase your copy today!

Sara Henning is the author of the full-length collection of poetry A Sweeter Water (2013), as well as a chapbook, To Speak of Dahlias (2012). Her poetry, fiction, interviews and book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in such journals as Willow Springs, Bombay Gin and the Crab Orchard Review. Currently a doctoral student in English and Creative Writing at the University of South Dakota, she serves as Managing Editor for The South Dakota Review. 

This week’s Wardrobe Best Dressed was selected by Erin Elizabeth Smith. Smith is the Creative Director at the Sundress Academy for the Arts and the author of two full-length collections, The Fear of Being Found (Three Candles Press 2008) and The Naming of Strays (Gold Wake Press 2011). Her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Mid-American, 32 Poems, Zone 3, Gargoyle, Tusculum Review, and Crab Orchard Review. She teaches a bit of everything in the English Department at the University of Tennessee and serves as the managing editor of Sundress Publications and Stirring.