Poetry by Jayne Shore

      Tim Vrtiska CC





​Mountain Bodies

It’s said Denver was carted over
by a band of angels who drunkenly
dropped the city on their way
to Sacramento. I suspect they scraped
the bottom of their wagon
on Longs Peak, the way it pierces
the clouds. Mom had summited
at 14,000 feet before I was born, slept
in lightning’s nursery.

If she was the child of runaways,
I began as the ache in her foot.
I was made in drought,
the Colorado River rushing
past like a rumor. Horses
and minnows scattered
over the land, the sun gated
off by the mountains not long
before dinnertime.

                                     Darkness walks
here early, Mom said with her eyes
so I never went alone to the spitting
river, never stopped in the glower
of a gas station. Get home safe
was the sweetest goodbye
someone could give. I didn’t
know then what can happen
to girls, only wished to be made
by the night into something
fearsome too.

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​

Jayne Shore is a Korean American writer living in Minneapolis. She holds a master’s degree in science writing from Johns Hopkins University and is working on her first collection of poetry.