I believe in the conservation
of birdwings, in tiny packages of light
& their insistence on shining
in the resurrection of dying things.
But even if we could take the DNA
from Einstein’s white hair & clone him, implant
him in my sponge-red uterus then guard me
till I emit him screaming from between my legs
pinning hopes that now he’d finally understand
how spooky action from a distance is real
& this time around we would keep time
whether or not it existed, still, he could not grow up
into the man I need him to be—
(first appeared in The Kenyon Review)
Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American writer and activist from the Southwestern desert and the author of three full-length poetry collections: Landscape with Headless Mama (2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize), Protection Spell (2016 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Series), and Girl with Death Mask (2017 Blue Light Books Prize). Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellowship, the Frost Place Latin@ scholarship, a National Latino Writers’ Conference scholarship, the Lascaux Review Poetry Prize, Phoebe Journal’s Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, and the Pinch Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Ploughshares, POETRY, TriQuarterly, Boston Review, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Witness, Southern Humanities Review, Missouri Review, and The Kenyon Review. She is editor-in-chief of Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and teaches at The Poetry Barn and Western New Mexico University. www.jennifergivhan.com