PENULTIMATE SONNET                                                                     
 
Autumn sun; parrots, as if the last green
leaves, take flight, their call across the grass.
The pomegranate on the leafless tree
pecked open, a gash in the ruddy side.
 
Too thin for winter, its cold will burn her.
Whether she married in joy—something
thin now about it now. The child flinches
when she leans in to kiss him, sometimes
 
she is a bird pecking at the last sweet kernel,
sometimes an arrow shot clean from the bow.
If life too has its seasons. Winter as
 
the windblown beach, the whiplashed sea.
Whatever is felt, covered over in cloud,
nine oktas wide, as if in fog or falling snow.
 
BIO
http://yalepress.yale.edu/yupbooks/book.asp?isbn=9780300122350 http://www.nightboat.org/title/inmost

Jessica Fisher is the author of Frail-Craft, which won the 2006 Yale Younger Poets Prize, and Inmost, recipient of the 2011 Nightboat Poetry Prize. Her poems appear in such journals as The American Poetry Review, The Believer, The Colorado Review, McSweeney’s, The New Yorker, The Threepenny Review, and TriQuarterly, and her translations have been published in The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, and Czeslaw Milosz’s New and Collected Poems: 1931-2001. 

She holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California at Berkeley, where she was also the Holloway Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetry and Poetics, and will join the faculty at Williams College in the fall of 2013. 

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