SHIRA DENTZ is the author of five books including SISYPHUSINA (PANK Books; soon to be republished by Astrophil Press), winner of the Nassar Prize, and how do i net thee (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), a National Poetry Series finalist, as well as two chapbooks including FLOUNDERS (Essay Press). Shira's poetry, hybrid and visual writing, nonfiction, criticism, and conversations have been featured in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Pleiades, Gulf Coast, Brooklyn Rail, Cincinnati Review, jubilat, Black Warrior Review, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Lana Turner, VOLT, Annulet, Apartment, New American Writing, Quarter After Eight, Idaho Review, The Rumpus, NPR, Verse Daily, Poetry Daily, The Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day Series (Poets.org) and The Poetry Society of America and The Poetry Foundation websites. She is the recipient of awards including an Academy of American Poets Prize and Poetry Society of America's Lyric Poem and Cecil Hemley Awards. Most recently, she’s the recipient of NELLE Literary Journal’s Three Sisters Award for creative nonfiction and an NEA/NYS arts grant for an image/text work-in-progress. Her creative work has been recognized with fellowships from the Ragdale Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, and MacDowell, and appears/is forthcoming in anthologies including Witness: An Anthology of Documentary Poems (Wesleyan University Press). She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a PhD from the University of Utah, and currently lives and works in upstate NY. More at shiradentz.com

Orb-Wobble

A father scrambles a child's mind with wind visible only by the thrashing. Trees blowing  voices in  the  child's  mind. Filling it up with bubbles, all foam and  fizz. Codes whole bodies of waves jostle in their mind. The web between blowing tree branches is skin; no, sky. Trees bob in an irregular rhythm of waves like densities of rain. Tree branches blowing as whole bodies of thought, so many. Each moving differently and if one is one's mind, the child, now grown, is moving too.

Water bulbs dress the windowsill from this  afternoon's  monsoon.  Raindrops like prickly hairs beard the windowpane. Draping like crystal chandeliers. Why haven't they dried already, it's been hours. Is it because it's so humid, or that the number of drops that fell exceeded the usual rainfall—though don't all drops that fall at once dry at the same rate? There are points of erasure in their constellations. For instance, one sees a cat or rabbit cut out of a dense paragraph of drops

WINDOW

Volume 15.1, Winter 25

Shira Dentz

Window & Orb-Wobble

Please note, these poems are best viewed on desktop.