Jenny George is the author of The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon 2018), and her poems have appeared in FIELD, Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fund, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Yaddo. Currently, she lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she serves as program coordinator for Hidden Leaf Foundation, a Buddhist-based social justice organization. She holds a BA in Human Ecology and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
The poem and manuscript below were included in the printed program of the 2015 Discovery Winners’ Reading. “The Drowning” was first published by Ploughshares.
She sank and died—the girl from out of town that summer. They pulled her body like waterweed, then winter came, enclosed the lake in glass, and sealed the dark cavern of our questions.
We skated on the frozen shell. All around, the mountains glittered chained in ice. The lake was pale blue and cracked with stars— We lay on our backs acquiring a sense of the ordinary. With the cold driving into our skulls we watched our breaths rise and vanish upwards into the depths.
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