Jeanine Stevens

Sunchokes

Jeanine Stevens

Let summer burst to wholeness the rind and husk stand firm.

Let olives fatten black and oily on Van Gogh’s gnarled branches.

May the female dragonfly, in a dither recognize the male’s transformation

from deep turquoise to glistening copper to match the drying earth.

Let us notice Red Cloud’s blue moon above smoke filled tamaracks and call it lovely.

In record heat, roadways buckle and heave, tar breaks into chunks like fudge.

Rivers change course, new villages spring up and folks revise old kinship charts.

No going back to past epochs, the romance of the three-toed camel, the albino musk ox.

Now, a more reasonable garden of chiggers and sunchokes all recreated by the same God.

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.