Origin Stories - Jennifer Schomburg Kanke

Salvia, Reblooming

    Salvia, Reblooming
    by Jennifer Schomburg Kanke


    Speak to me of love
	            and I will speak to you
		                 of salvia bought on sale,


    twenty-cents, an end
	             of the season find. The man
		                     said bloomless shafts


    weren’t worth the dirt.
	            Forget to water,
		                    leave bare on chilly nights.


    Speak to me of love
	            and I will tell you of replanting
                                   in terracotta pots, good drainage,


    of some protected spot,
                  an alcove on the porch
		                  where the winds can’t reach. 



    Originally published in Journal of Compressed Literary Arts in July 2013 and can be found
      in the archived issue here: https://matterpress.com/journal/2013/07/

Origin Stories – Salvia, Reblooming

I wrote this poem during the first semester of my doctoral program in 2010. There were so many changes happening, everything felt chaotic and awful. We’d sold our house on 12 acres in the hills of Southeastern Ohio and moved to a small apartment above an Aflac in downtown Tallahassee so I could feel like a “real” writer. But I felt like more of a fraud than ever. The poem is part love poem to my husband and part FU to the guy I had a crush on at the time (like I said: chaotic and awful). It came after I hid myself away in a little park beside my apartment reading Coleridge one afternoon. Now I intentionally entrain to various poems to get their rhythms in my soul as I write, but I’d never heard of doing that then. Yet that’s exactly what I did that day in the park.

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BIO

Jennifer Schomburg Kanke is a writer and editor living in Florida. She is the author of the chapbook of micropoems Fine, Considering (Rinky Dink Press, 2019) about her experiences undergoing chemotherapy for ovarian cancer; the winner of the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s annual contest in 2013 for the under 10 line category; and has been nominated for both the Pushcart and the Best of the Net. Her work has appeared in Massachusetts Review, Salamander, New Ohio Review, Prairie Schooner, Pleiades, Nimrod, and other journals. She currently serves as a reader for the Dodge and was previously Reviews Editor at Pleiades, Poetry Editor for the Southeast Review, an editor at Quarter After Eight and a reader for Emrys. She has a PhD from Florida State University and multiple degrees (MA, MEd, and BSEd) from Ohio University.

Her current writing projects include a novel-in-verse about Appalachian Ohio from the 1930s to the early 2000s and a fictional memoir written by entraining to William Wordsworth’s “The Prelude.” Her writing often covers topics related to socioeconomic class, C-PTSD, Appalachia, and the environment. She blogs sporadically (typically about new NSA cookie recipes she’s developing) at https://lightmeridian.wordpress.com. If you’d like to contact her about her writing, you can message her from her author page on Facebook.