Lying awake I remember branches
scraping the night window, I, a child
away from my crowded home to my
cousin’s spacious country rooms,
she and I in separate beds.

How to hold the memory of my heart
racing in the dark, the small body
curled, the wind wild? How to hold
that child until dawn ignites the leaf
with its tiny separate rooms,
the stem clinging?

—Jean Janzen, a poet living in Fresno, California, is the author of six previous collections of poetry who has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and other awards. A graduate of Fresno Pacific University and California State University of Fresno, she has taught at Fresno Pacific and Eastern Mennonite University. Janzen is author of What the Body Knows (DreamSeeker Books/Cascadia, 2015).