JENNIFER M. PHILLIPS
★ ★ ★ ★
POETRY
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Image by Ivan Radulovich
Eyelids
Such a delicate blue, those eyelids before waking
like the lip of Meissen porcelain
tried by light, or a fontanelle
in the cupping of a tender palm.
Love’s dereliction in sleep
strewn on the rumpled heart
without defense or reason
to keep safe like the desert’s only well.
I watched as over a hatchling
an ibis tendering a wing
until waking, you would step away
leaving us both out under those wheeling shadows.
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A much-published bi-national immigrant, gardener, Bonsai-grower, painter, Jennifer M Phillips has lived in five states, two countries, and now, with gratitude, in Wampanoag ancestral land on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Her chapbooks: Sitting Safe In the Theatre of Electricity (i-blurb.com, 2020) and A Song of Ascents (Orchard Street Press, 2022). Two of Phillips’ poems are nominated for this year’s Pushcart Prize.
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