POETRY

Protection Spell (Riot’s Eye)

By Jennifer Givhan     VOLUME 49.4     2015 AUBURN WITNESS POETRY PRIZE FINALIST

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They’re chasing my boy, his
dreadlocks streaming

behind him like bed sheets
from the second-story

window of a house fire.

          He and the asphalt
dovetail

& I watch & I watch
like a black hole swallowing

a baby universe. (This is the last
of the gunmetal dreams.)

I wring the blood
from my ribcage

my world in your chest, child.

          When I was a child
I believed God held us

like a paper bag
to the mouth of a panic attack.

          How I’m holding
a city like my boy,

my boy to my own
siren wail--

How the wind-as-breath
          moved us, bent our

tallest trees
to snapping, like our songs

on our knees.





JENNIFER GIVHAN is a Mexican-American poet from the Southwestern desert. She is the author of Landscape with Headless Mama, winner of the Pleiades Press Editors Prize for Poetry, and Protection Spell, forthcoming from The Miller Williams Poetry Series. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellowship, a Latin@ Scholarship from The Frost Place, the 2015 Lascaux Review Prize in Poetry, and The Pinch Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Best of the Net, Best New Poets, AGNI, Crazyhorse, Blackbird, and The Kenyon Review. She is Poetry Editor at Tinderbox Poetry Journal and teaches at The Poetry Barn.

VOLUME 49.4

This poem was a finalist for our 2015 Auburn Witness Poetry Prize Honoring Jake Adam York. Learn more about the contest here.