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Her Garden
by J. C. Todd
Under the tigers,
her Janie keeps whimpering,
my Lambie’s there,
and no glossolalia of love
is going to put that child
back to sleep
with Lambie lying near
the lilies’ orange tongues.
Three in the morning,
what an hour
to hunt for a toy!
She pulls on slippers,
robe, sees in the mirror
her face has been muddled
by bad dreams
and a startled waking.
The far corner
of the tiny garden
looks like India in moonlight,
sweet pea all filigree
like the carved lintel
of a temple.
If only absolution
were like this, a land
the late-risen moon revealed
as an essential, yet gentle
gloss of the familiar,
a land whose intricacy assured
whate’s lost is here
whether or not
you find it.
Then she would be
who she is,
not the penitent
she’s been turned into,
the one whose doctor
sacrificed a baby
to save her body’s life,
but a woman in a night shift
who is blurred by sleep
sent almost at dawn
by her wakened daughter
into the dark garden
to find a lamb left out,
its heart-shaped head
and vulnerable haunch
lying in the dirt
she weeds and turns each day.
PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED:
Sow’s Ear III:4. 1992.
Nightshade. Pine Press, 1995, 2000.
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Bio: J. C. Todd’s poems and translations have appeared in the anthology Shade 2004,
and in American Poetry Review, The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Crab Orchard
Review and other journals. Pine Press published two chapbooks: Nightshade (1995) and Entering
Pisces (1985).
Awards include a fellowship in poetry from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, two awards for poetry from
the Leeway Foundation, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts international artist exchange fellowship to
the Schloss Wiepersdorf colony in Germany, a scholarship to The Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators
in Sweden, and a stipend from the Latvian Cultural Capital Foundation. Her poems have received five Pushcart
Prize nominations.
She is an associate editor for the poetry web magazine, The Drunken Boat
(www.thedrunkenboat.com), where she
has edited special features on contemporary Lithuanian and Latvian poetry in translation, and she was guest
poetry editor for the Summer, 2005 issue of The Bucks County Review, and co-editor of “Recurrence
in Another Tongue: Poets Translating Poets” that appeared in Frigate 4 in 2003.
A lecturer in Creative Writing and in the Writing for College program at Bryn Mawr College, she has an MFA
from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College.
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