Poetry by Jennifer A. McGowan

                           ​Eric Sonstroem CC



Lightning at Night


Nearly blue daylight.  We met, as always,
in the park where everything else was taller;

walked barefoot, me in nothing but bra
and shorts, drenched through, not quite

dancing, not quite touching.  When lightning
struck the dumpsters we felt the concussion,

them jumping and us, stunned, too close and
deafened.  We understood tenpins then,

how force can knock you sideways, into
each other, shift you—feet skittering--

only to be righted again, reckless, laughing.
When it was only rain and darkness we sat unseeing

in the picnic shelter, talking smack about Shakespeare and
anyone else too dead to fight back.  Stumbled

to the cars.  I touched your shoulder.  The storm
paused.

​

Jennifer A. McGowan took her PhD from the University of Wales and is a Tudor scholar, but nonetheless she is not the Jennifer McGowan who wrote the Maids of Honor fiction series. One day I'll get my name back. She is disabled, has published five collections, two of which won competitions, shooting archery from a chair, is a calligraphy, illuminator, and indifferent seamstress. Her most recent win, for the pamphlet Still Lives with Apocalypse, can be bought here: https://prolebooks.co.uk/

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