You Say

You Say

Jen Grace Stewart

all your poems
have windows. It is too soon
to ask you to open them.

The trees in this poem
are golden, that minute
before everything starts

to give way, yellow scruff 
at your heels, wading
through a quick beauty

like feeling your heart leap 
on a hillroad when 
the car takes it too fast. 

At church, I take bread
and the wine. Through the windows 
beyond the altar, blue swoons.

I don’t discern between
vision and longing, believe
I too could be as carefully read 

as a poem, that attention itself
feels like love, that I might
take this, and not have to break.

---

Jen Grace Stewart
Poet & Teacher

Jen is the author of Madonna, Complex (2020, Poiema/Cascade). She teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

Photography by Alexander Mass