Two Poems by Sara Henning
/Blueberry-Picking
Sara Henning
- After Seamus Heaney
The ripe ones
are sin-bruised,
eager for summer
to swindle each one
to tipsy pulp. But O,
how my husband
reaches for them,
wax-laquered, root-fed,
heat under the skin
which means the sugar
has turned. I watch
him feed the chosen
into our bucket’s
belly, wince as he flings
the unripe—
still like rabbit’s eyes—
onto the ground.
I savor the turgor
in each snap, too
sharp and brief
to be called agonal.
Little deaths
I’ll think of on nights
we lay together,
too hot to sleep.
Want eulogizes want
until berry-
smooth, its own
tart lightning surges
down. So love
will outlive us,
we tried for a child.
At first, I welcomed
the specters to
our bed. Night after
night, pleasure
murmured us
to sleep. After months,
my womb
still empty,
his touch turned
to anger, lust
-stung, a secret
whispered into my skin—
We waited too
long. Your body
is punishing us.
But I’m thinking
of blueberries,
the inky knots still
vine-smitten
at the end
of a hard season.
No one blesses
the summer
still left in them.
Noli mi tangere—
I watch a fox
take their silky wounds
into her mouth.
Death Buried the Daughter I Was
Sara Henning
I.
I talk to the ghosts holding vigil in my house,
because I am a child still burying my dead.
Death buried the daughter I was.
Daughter, a heat-bruised gardenia lush inside me.
My mother swore the season’s first gardenia
was God’s proof she’d live, though cancer flowered
inside her. God’s proof, when no flowers
came to her garden. Her last spring, she let
her garden go. Chicken hawks dragging bones
in a lapsed orchard—that was the smell of cancer tasting her.
That smell—chicken trucks blazing the road.
Shit lacing the feathers of the damned.
II.
In the hospital, my husband talks to God
all night. He wakes with fear on his breath.
He wakes with fear on his breath, acid
spiking his blood. Doctors call it Ketoacidosis.
A blood moan. Doctors threaten ICU.
I ask my husband not to die tonight.
We all die a little bit every night.
I heard my mother’s last breath swell
above her oxygen tank—my mother’s last breath.
Her body sang its eulogy as her soul let go.
I sang her eulogy as I let her soul go.
At the funeral home, I kissed her.
Grief on my breath, I’m still kissing her.
III.
The first time I shot up my husband
at home, I triggered the needle.
I triggered the needle, injecting
his bicep with insulin. Once, a bee stung
my bicep at the end of our cul-de-sac.
A honeybee shot her stinger into my skin.
Stinger in my skin, she entered me.
Afraid of my pain, I beat her out of the sky.
Fear made me beat her. I didn’t know bees, born
mouth-less, live in constant hunger.
Imagine it—hunger, then your belly
ripped from its stinger. And I killed her.
I’m ripped from my trigger. I shoot up
my husband. One day, I’ll bury him.
These poems come from Terra Incognita, a manuscript I have been working on. Terra incognita, Latin for “unknown land,” is a term used by cartographers to describe terrains that have been unmapped or otherwise undocumented. Though the term was first witnessed in Ptolemy’s Geography, a work re-popularized during the 15th century Age of Discovery, it lost its geographical mystique during the 19th century, when all coastlines and continents had been charted. The term, though obsolete, retains a mystique still curious to urban legend. It was once said that cartographers labelled unknown regions with the moniker “Here be dragons,” as though beasts naturally skulked the precincts of parts unknown to humankind.
One need not be familiar with the term terra incognita to know that we culturally pathologize the unknown. The unknown, of course, often transcends physical limitations. Therefore, I’m considering the term—terra incognita—as it applies to the cycle of grief: how can one re-enter the world—and make sense of it—after indelible loss has occurred?
This collection of poems seeks to explore—and resolve—such a paradox, through poems investigating my mother's death from colon cancer, my struggle with infertility and miscarriage, and my husband's recent hospitalizations from diabetes.
Sara Henning is the author of View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), co-winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award. Winner of the 2019 High Plains Book Award, it has been short listed by Jacar Press for the 2018 Julie Suk Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry Society of America's George Bogin Memorial Award, and a Tennessee Williams Scholarship in poetry to the 2019 Sewanee Writers' Conference. Henning teaches writing at Stephen F. Austin State University, where she also serves as poetry editor for Stephen F. Austin State University Press.
