Home > Poetry > Storm Watch
profile/janet-kiplinger.md
Published: Wed Oct 15 1975
Eva Lundsager, Were now like (detail), 2021, oil on canvas
AGNI 4 Nature Parenthood Journeys
Storm Watch

10 pm and the river opens up
to spring storms.
A city ripped up just west
of here.
It’s april
and there’s still a chance of frost.
Seasons on this side
of the globe shift—
summer comes late and stays late.

I guess I want to bear children,
but I just wander through the house all day,
smelling wet manure on the neighbor’s lawn.
At 11 the forecast
changes and a cold front moves in.
When the wind flares up
I crack the windows
at each end of the house.

But I’ve never had a child.
I swell up each month with water
and nothing else. Not royalties,
not bills from foreign hotels.

I meant to say all this bluntly.
Like: the rain washed my garden downhill.
I was going to mention the labor of childbirth, blood,
the afterbirth wetting the bed.
Maybe the seasons around me come at different times;
I don’t care.
If I knew what I wanted to say
I wouldn’t have come to this.

See what's inside AGNI 4
Poetry
Letters to Omma—Reunion
Online 2023 Nature Loss Journeys
Poetry
Dead Reef
by Enrique S. Villasis
Translated from the Filipino by Bernard Capinpin
AGNI 94 Loss Nature Journeys
Poetry
The Long Emergency
AGNI 91 Dystopia Nature Parenthood

Janet Kiplinger tells us that she is currently a graduate student at San Francisco State. (updated 1975)

Back to top