Poems by Jane Zwart
Echt
Doubloons, tooth-crimped; kopi luwak,
macaque-hawked; veal peeled from the calf
who drank shakes in the dark. Also pearls,
but only those accident sows and luck
harvests.
————Of souvenirs, the arrowhead.
Of symphonies, the one Beethoven wrote
in exile from the world’s volumes.
Of mothers, the woman Solomon tricked
out of her right to raise her son.
Nothing is more echt
than what we forage
from ick, nothing realer
than the commodities
a little cruelty forged.
Gray’s Anatomy
Smoke has no cheekbones, languor no feet,
and where gray is a body of water, dish
or ditch, you must abstract its volume
from the shape of the sink that holds it,
its surface from the loosestrife it repeats.
An elephant’s amygdala, a rag doll’s abs.
If a wolf weren’t carnivorous, her stealth,
dust never ignited by light. Where gray
is a body of work, you must infer vertebrae
from ellipses, from a kneaded eraser a heart.
Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University and co-edits book reviews for Plume. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, HAD, and Ploughshares, and her first collection of poems is coming out with Orison Books in fall 2025.
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