Volume 69, Number 1 · Fall 2019
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Even the Trees

Jenn Givhan

Even the trees without buds this April even those
without green without bright whose arms stay bare

even my belly stayed bare when the boy I loved that winter
got another girl pregnant even the belly I scraped for him

bittered as the cactus rinds in my yard
even the porch where ornaments crackled the sidewalk where I’d

splintered each glass to its sharpest edge even barefoot I’d reeled—
even those trees are singing the warmth come early

this spring & love has found me my arms raised
in what I always imagined [even grief] could have been praise

Jenn Givhan, a Mexican American writer and activist from the Southwestern desert, is the author of four poetry collections, most recently Rosa’s Einstein (Camino del Sol, 2019), two chapbooks, and two novels, Trinity Sight and Jubilee, both forthcoming from Blackstone Press. Her poems appear in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, Poetry, the New Republic, Crazyhorse, and the Kenyon Review. She has received, among other honors, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, an Emerging Voices Fellowship, and New Ohio Review’s NORward Prize for Poetry, chosen by Tyehimba Jess.