Ironweed
Jan Conn has published 9 books of poetry, most recently Tomorrow’s Bright White Light (Tightrope, 2016). She has won a CBC Literary Award and the P.K. Page Founders’ Award for Poetry. Her work is featured in many journals and anthologies including The Massachusetts Review, Barrow Street, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, as well as The Best Canadian Poetry [2009, 2011, and 2014]. She is a member of the collaborative poetry group Yoko’s Dogs, whose most recent publication is Rhinoceros (Gaspereau, 2016). Jan currently lives in western Massachusetts.
There is something in you of an iron-sided steamship
an architecture of unpliable stems, toothed
leaves, a crow’s nest of disk flowers
a pile of deep violet slippers
uplifted on junkyard stilts
stiff-kneed, towering overhead
as though dredged from some scrap iron sea bed
and winched roots-first into place
overrunning meadows and pastures
obdurate perennials, late-summer bloomers
witnesses to nightlong astonishment
as the Perseids brilliantine their long hair and flare
and the stars stutter, waking from a long dream
of falling
Jan Conn has published 9 books of poetry, most recently Tomorrow’s Bright White Light (Tightrope, 2016). She has won a CBC Literary Award and the P.K. Page Founders’ Award for Poetry. Her work is featured in many journals and anthologies including The Massachusetts Review, Barrow Street, The Fiddlehead, The Malahat Review, as well as The Best Canadian Poetry [2009, 2011, and 2014]. She is a member of the collaborative poetry group Yoko’s Dogs, whose most recent publication is Rhinoceros (Gaspereau, 2016). Jan currently lives in western Massachusetts.