Jennifer Keith
featured maryland writers
Jennifer Keith’s poems have appeared in The Kansas City Review, Able Muse Review, Sewanee Theological Review, Quartet, Free State Review, Welter, Best American Poetry 2015 and elsewhere. Keith was a finalist for the 2021 Erskine J. Poetry Prize from Smartish Pace and her first collection, Terminarch, was selected by David Yezzi for the 2023 Able Muse Book Award. A new manuscript, Rising Lights, is due out from Galileo Press in 2028.
Albany, Georgia, July 1994
A slow mystery train
car to car, with lights on
in the homicide sun.
Coffins float one by one
on the shoulders of flood waters,
the dead resurrected and wandering.
The mourners cannot find them
in the sudden wilderness
of boiling mud.
A slow train, easing
like cars with their lights on
floating into the night
and back into day, naked
beneath the glare
of a homicide sun
tucking themselves
among the roots of dark trees
where mourners cannot find them.
The TV crew films the slow parade
from a helicopter. The footage
plays unnoticed in the bar.
A girl feels a bloody thrum
of snare drums from the jukebox
and dances like a fish
speared through the heart.