Jennifer Militello

Posted in Past Guests

Poet and professor Jennifer Militello is the author of a chapbook and three books of poetry, including Body Thesaurus, which was named one of the top ten poetry books of 2013 by Best American Poetry. Her poems have been published widely in such journals as American Poetry Review, The New Republic, and The Paris Review, and anthologized in Best New Poets and The Manifesto Project. She is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee, and her award-winning poetry has garnered her grants and fellowships from the New Hampshire State Council on the Arts and Writers at Work, among others. Militello teaches in the MFA program at New England College. She lives in Goffstown, New Hampshire.

The Museum of Being Born

I remember now. Something was chasing
blackbirds from my mouth. My hands
were willows or their speechless wives.

I remember morning like a feline thing
with a pelt gray-gloved as a mild girl’s iris
or the sighing a highway does in its sleep.

Time grew bilingual. Roads so far along
the edge they were liquids still condensing.
The fog was graphite. The night B-flat.

I had a complexion and her sonnets matured
to wax. I burned fertile with the thought
of death. I ate from a dish of camphor.

I woke to each streetlamp’s liquor
at the bottom of the glass, the cold,
ornate lateness the neon diseases to light.

How small my gallop away from the dark,
how the seeds have the smallest fingers
I have ever felt in my eyes wanting

their way out. And off in the distance,
pain, an anvil for beating mere mongrels
into elegant beasts. Too late,

the soft unlathing, the not-yet grief
of loons. Love, the roost of writhing.
Futility, my little alone.

–
From Verse Daily

Links

• Poet’s website
• “Why Write.” Green Mountain Review. 30 July 2013.

Media

Seminar with Tim Liardet | November 15, 2016

Reading with Tim Liardet | November 15, 2016