Jenny Molberg
HEREDITARY
– Yyvonne Deakins Collins, Elaine de Kooning, 1968
She spoke and the breasts
heard singing. Heard song
and called back. Fern
closed in around her face.
Without a word, the room
brimmed lemon,
lemon and veins of green
while the fountain calmed itself
in the yard. She held the cancer.
It wasn’t her child but she tended to it.
Generations passed through
the twentieth century until a duct
opened and sang my great-aunt
into the place above my mother’s heart.
Jenny Molberg is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently The Court of No Record (LSU Press, 2023), a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist. Her fourth book, The Medium, is forthcoming from LSU Press in 2027. Her poems and essays have recently appeared in The Adroit Journal, The American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, The Missouri Review, and elsewhere. A National Endowment for the Arts fellow, she is Professor of Writing, Literature, and Publishing and Editor-in-Chief of Ploughshares at Emerson College.