Suzanne Swanson
​Image by Nige Hurll on Pixabay                                                                                      
Suzanne Swanson is the author of House of Music and the chapbook What Other Worlds: Postpartum Poems. She is a winner of the Loft Mentor Series; she helped to found Laurel Poetry Collective. Recent poems have appeared in TerrainThe HopperSalamanderHampden-Sydney Poetry ReviewTexas Borderlands Poetry ReviewPoets Reading the NewsSWWIM, and in the Land Stewardship Letter. She rows on the Mississippi River and is happiest near big water.
​Traveling west to look for migrating geese, making a stop at Fairview cemetery

Where are you now? I cannot find you anywhere, “Searching,” Laura Jensen 




Ten years after the last shovels
and fake grass. The visits

shorten. This trip on the cusp
of spring. I remove

my gloves, sweep away stiff 
poplar leaves, edges curled, grass

clippings, too, from the red stone 
where they sheltered

all winter. Two spots 
of dark wet dirt on my two

fingers, a darkness graying quickly
in the sweep of an east

wind marking the cold
front’s advance. I kiss my fingers

press them to my father’s
name. Kiss. Mother. They prayed

for eternity and now 
here it is at the edge 

of a shallow lake growing 
thick with unwelcome

phragmites, open
fields beyond, plowed yet still

holding ancient decayed 
roots -- little blue, turkey-

foot -- a memory generations
long and still the chapped

wind swoops and sweeps
and swirls the old

tallgrass prairie, scouring
its surface, unable ever to know

what lies beneath. 


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