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  • Still Life with Sage and the Names of My Children
  • Keetje Kuipers (bio)

I picked all the flowers, I palmed all the stones.

I dropped the nameless insects onto my tongueand felt their black wings unfurl. I held the dead

buck by his antlers and dragged him through the sage,

brought my teeth to the tender bridge of ribs and feduntil the glossy maggots overtook me.

I climbed the red rocks robed in their red dust.

I put the earth—all its charms—within me,into each waiting pocket, lip, and ear.

What will happen when my body can no longer

hold this fragrant salt, its hardened tears,inside? Let mine into the dirt. The names

chosen for my children are already fast

across the sky like the ochre feathers that framethe blackbird's shrug. There is no such thing

as a scar, no matter how much I want

to be one. Every birth—even the wingsof the caddis lifting from the river

in a shroud—a momentary hunger. [End Page 8]

Keetje Kuipers

Keetje Kuipers has been a Stegner Fellow, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference Fellow, and Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident. Her work has been published widely, and her poems have appeared in the Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry anthologies. She is the author of the poetry collections Beautiful in the Mouth (BOA, 2010), The Keys to the Jail (BOA, 2014), and the forthcoming Outside the Refugium (BOA, 2019). An associate editor at Poetry Northwest and teacher at Hugo House, she lives with her family at the edge of the Salish Sea where she is at work on a novel and a memoir.

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