kin
By Jenevieve Carlyn Hughes
January 15, 2023
January 15, 2023
|
in the evenings, we walked
to the soft silver pines, tucking tufts & wisps into the branches for the winged convocations of the downy-wise to covet— to be taken up into the mysteries, woven with leaves & lichen moss, feathers, twigs, spun silk: entwined. my grandmother wore her hair in a swirl above her head— a yellow lily resting on a pond; we never saw a frog hop out yet on spring nights it was an ever-present possibility: a small amphibian might appear, viridian as a river rock, to sit & sing to the moon. if a song thrush thatched a hermitage—a peasant’s castle in the knotted boughs of the old crabapple, or if a chiffchaff overwintered in my braid, i could learn the avian folkways: knowing when my feathered kin was jubilant or tired, & needed rest from prophesying; whole ecologies would branch & bloom around us—orchards swirling about a braided nest. |
Jenevieve Carlyn Hughes lives near the Long Island Sound, a stone’s throw from a railway line and a couple miles from a nature preserve with a thousand acres of coastal forest, sand dunes, and salt marsh. Her poems and essays have recently been published in the Connecticut River Review, Northern New England Review, Typishly Literary Magazine, Dillydoun Review, and other places, including the anthology, In the Garden: Community Storytelling on Food, Ecology, and Place (Torrey House Press, 2022). Twitter: @jenevievecarlyn