STIRRING
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
Founded in 1999, Stirring is one of the oldest continuously publishing journals on the internet.
Stirring is an electronic quarterly journal.
JILL CRAMMOND
There is a certain state of grace that is not loving.
Your face when I say No, Love.
The phone unanswered, the love letter unread, the deer
still dead. What grace in loving what was.
Impossible. As if love, that bloody organ, could be stalked
like some wounded thing, or, Love, crushed
beneath the heel of your beloved hunting boot.
The shotgun, my Love, the bullet, your tongue.
Not grace, but a drawn and quartered kind of love
that loves you at the altar even as you leave.
You loved me
or you love me.
If one of us loves that doe hard enough
she will come back from the dead, love her life again.
Jill Crammond’s chapbook, Handbook For Unwell Mothers, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2023. Her poems have appeared in The Quarter(ly) Journal, Sweet Tree Review, Limp Wrist, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, Mom Egg Review, Pidgeonholes, Mother Mary Comes to Me: A Pop Culture Poetry Anthology (Madville Publishing), Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulist Poetry, and others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her poems recently appeared as part of Poem Village, a community program celebrating local poetry in the Adirondack town of Saranac Lake. She currently lives in upstate NY with her two children and teaches art and preschool at a nature-based school.
