| The Honey Land Review Spring 2009 Volume 1, Issue 2 |
Insomnia Jenn Blair |
Sometimes at night when I can’t sleep I think of the man who spends his days out on the African plains hoping for death and destruction squat dab in the middle of his camera mouth and when my own back hurts I imagine the permanent curve being built into his spine, unwilling cathedral arch as his leg muscles tense and his tendons ache, that perfect stillness of a picture-book saint, all for art, all for being there when the concentration coils and the haunches rear back, and the tooth and the claw in all their glory clasp and bite. Sometimes at night when I toss and turn under my grandmother’s patchwork quilt, I think of him, squatted down all afternoon huddling beneath a blanket of zebra stripes— that hot fabric, how suffocating it grows and what must its name be? This ill concocted amorphous creature void of hoof and bone and grazing the same dry patch of ground for hours. |
Photo By Francis Raven
JENN BLAIR is from Yakima, WA. She is a Park Hall Fellow at the University
of Georgia where she teaches British Literature. She has published in The
Tusculum Review, Copper Nickel, and Stone Table Review among others.
of Georgia where she teaches British Literature. She has published in The
Tusculum Review, Copper Nickel, and Stone Table Review among others.