Jennifer K. Sweeney’s second poetry collection, How to Live on Bread and Music, received the James Laughlin Award from the Academy of America Poets and the 2009 Perugia Press Prize. Her first book, Salt Memory, won the 2006 Main Street Rag Poetry Award. Nominated six times for a Pushcart Prize,
her poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Southern Review, Hunger Mountain, Crab Orchard, Spoon River and Passages North where she won the 2009 Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize. After living in San Francisco for twelve years, she currently lives in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where she teaches poetry privately.----------
Sea-Change
after the waiting years leaden years
keening oceanside for an answer
from the original dark
you emerge distinct
one life perpetually not-there
not-to-come
then suddenly at work with long division
sac of cells we
watched in the flux
via negativa
you eddy forth little blue fish
little big heart
to be here with me now
means we made a study of
insistence means
I will not forget the profound
absence from which
you began