

  • Why I Think of Jungle Crows
  • Chelsea B. Desautels (bio)

after Peter Harris

A Japanese shrine is lit by ten thousand candles.One by one, jungle crows carry the candles away

to the fields. The flight does not extinguishthe flame—the wick remains hot. Then, the crows bury

their new light under dry leaves, saving the tallowin the wax for another day. They'll eat later.

In the hospital, midwives search my wombfor a baby, but there's no heartbeat and no sign

of miscarriage. Still, blood tests show somethingsomewhere in my body is pregnant. I lullaby

baby where are you. The women are getting nervous.

The worshippers can't find their candles. The fields are on fire. [End Page 62]

Chelsea B. Desautels

Chelsea B. DesAutels' work appears or is forthcoming in the Missouri Review, Copper Nickel, The Adroit Journal, Pleiades, Willow Springs, and elsewhere. Natasha Trethewey named Chelsea's manuscript, Metastasis, the finalist for the AWP Award Series Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. DesAutels received an MFA from the University of Houston, where she served as Poetry Editor of Gulf Coast. She lives with her family in Minneapolis.



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