Jeanine Stevens
Image by Lesley Riley
Jeanine Stevens is the author of Inheritor and Limberlost (Future Cycle Press), and Sailing on Milkweed (Cherry Grove Collections). She is winner of the MacGuffin Poet Hunt and The Ekphrasis Prize. Gertrude Sitting: Portraits of Women, won the 2020 Chapbook Prize from Heartland Review Press. Jeanine recently received her seventh Pushcart Nomination. She studied poetry at U.C. Davis and Community of Writers, Olympic Valley and is Faculty Emerita at American River College.
©2021 West Trade Review
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Testament
Looking at the sky a long time,
weary of all this brightness,
always noon, always summer: chrome rivers, emerald trees,
silver wind. The day sky thin as eggshell.
I know blue as in the tiny veins
in wrists and under eyelids,
and green as in emerald leaves of star jasmine,
snapped tendrils weeping white.About stars— their beauty
must exist elsewhere.
Still caught in Eve’s drama, weary
of the apple that didn’t work.
There were choices; one dark pear
still hangs alone, winter pear: Bosque.Only eat fruits in season: pith, skin, rind.
I’m having it seeds and all.
Sky gives gems: ruby, topaz, jade,
gnome’s lights miniscule lanterns
brightening forest and grotto.
Above juniper’s sharp peaks, a queen drags her black cloak
floating close to heaven.
And stars, do they pulse inarticulate sounds?
Starlings in flight, abstract art,
boomerang.I wait at the stage door
for the archer, the goat, the crab.
