Three Poems by Jeanne Wagner

The Homing Instinct
         ―Princeville, Kauai

The guide tells us Laysan albatross look
the same at seventy as they do at seventeen,

Except to another albatross I think, but stop
short of saying, not wanting to spoil

the exception which proves the rule, every
rule a law made to be broken, a law

much like gravity, which is why all good
escape artists want feathers on their arms.

I envy migratory birds, the way they navigate
the same sky I always want to get lost in.

The albatross chicks waiting, solitary, a little
sullen, resting on their snug circles of dirt.

The first story always one of place, of hunger,
or being hungered for, like their prey,

squid or krill, or the eggs of the flying fish
with their built-in longing to break into sky.

The albatross almost became extinct because
women wanted feathers in their hats.

But how lovely I felt at seventeen when I wore
my new hat to Mass, the feathers all dyed

that pink we mistake for innocence, and me
just sitting there, barely dreaming of flight.

*

One Person

Peter Sellers said, I do not exist. There used to be a me,
but I had it surgically removed.

We laugh, yet who doesn’t feel pain remembering some
layer of skin

flayed by a casual remark, and afterwards the air, without
even a breeze, raking the spot raw.

We are always one person, no matter how many times
we’ve been effaced.

See how even the moon suffers its monthly mutilations.
This goddess of a sphere

left like a slice of lemon peel garnishing an empty plate.
But now a whole new moon

floats over the dawn redwood in the frame of our skylight.
Who else will ever see it,

the nexus of this place, these seconds, with these eyes?
Who will ever know you as I do?

*

After a Stroke, the Doctor Asks Me to Describe the Cookie Theft Picture

         ―The Cookie Theft Picture, a cartoon of a retro family
         in the kitchen, is a common diagnostic tool for aphasia.

She looks like my Fifties mother asking me to turn down the heat.
Our leg of lamb, forgotten in the oven, was beginning to overcook.
A boy is reaching for the cookie jar, the stool slipping from his feet.
The girl lifts her hand. The boy starts to fall. His falling overlooked.

My mother overcooked the leg of lamb, her body helpless on the floor.
This mom is drying dishes, ignoring the water cascading from the sink.
The girl lifts up her hand to her brother, but I’m not that girl anymore.
This isn’t my dysfunctional family, but I keep searching for some link.

This mom is drying dishes. The overflowing water a symbol of tears,
Every kitchen is an engine room, is a hearth, the heart of the home.
My dysfunctional family must be at it again; the meaning isn’t clear.
I fell on the kitchen floor, where once I found my father, already gone.

Every kitchen is an engine room, but I long for the heart of the home
where once my Fifties mother kept asking me to turn down the heat.
Falling is a family trait. Like gravity. Something I’ve always known.
This boy, he just keeps on reaching. The stool slipping from his feet.

*

Jeanne Wagner is the author of four chapbooks and three full-length collections: The Zen Piano-mover, which won the NFSPS Poetry Prize, In the Body of Our Lives, published by Sixteen Rivers Press, and Everything Turns Into Something Else, published as runner-up for the Grayson Book Prize. Her manuscript, One Needful Song is the recent winner of the 2024 Catamaran Prize. Her more recent awards include the 2020 Joy Harjo Award and the 2021 Naugatuck Prize. Her work has appeared in North American Review, Cincinnati Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Shenandoah and The Southern Review.