Don't Leave Hungry: Fifty Years of Southern Poetry Review

The Sympathy of Dust

E D I S O N J E N N I N G S The Sympathy of Dust Her Hoover Vortex Master hums, the house a diary of dross, Pop-Tart crumbs, playground grit, wicked grains of glass the broom did not pick up when her boyfriend broke a long-neck Miller beer, fragments of a narrative she tracks from room to room, cobwebs, dead bees, used-up lipstick, pollen shed by Easter lilies one week past their prime, and later when she cannot sleep, the nightscape fills with cosmic dust she heard Carl Sagan talk about on the old Tonight Show, comet ash and star chaff settling on her sleeping son and on the now remembered face of the whiskey-crippled father she tried not to love, how it falls, the dust of genesis, until she falls asleep at last. 284 ❚ The 2000s ...