Jenna Le

New House

I took up occupancy at year’s end.
An ex-Manhattanite, I felt unmoored
on hearing cosmic silences distend
each dusk outside the windows and the doors,
as if I’d been transported to deep space.
The bare tree trunks beyond the glass panes seemed
bar-lines on a song-sheet; the notes, erased.
Squirrels circled round like costumed elves. I dreamed
one evening I saw a brown-haired girl
wearing a plain fawn jumper flecked with snow
come linger in the space between two gnarled
and leafless trees and do a puppet show
with just her empty hands. I felt no fear
but watched, immersed. I blinked; she was a deer.

Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2017), an Elgin Awards Second Place winner, and Manatee Lagoon (forthcoming, Acre Books, October 2022). Her poems appear in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Measure, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, West Branch, and elsewhere. She works as a physician in New York City.