Julia Rose Lewis: A Keeper of Winter Zephyrs

Tell Me a Story Or Another Vineyard

My sister keeps seeing a woman with

a long gray braid and glasses, so she

calls me.  I tell her that my hair is as

short as hers, the last time I saw her. 

I have been thinking of Catalina a lot lately.

“Grapes and grays and graze,” we

say. 

Sleeping Sevenling

It was the time of the metaphors,

the verb to be,

participles.

Winter,

static winter,

winter ring was the rest of the world. 

Meanwhile, I was trying to hold a place in my head all winter. 

In Memoriam

Of the tree

that thought itself a horse.

A feeling for my steed please, the tree

has turned into a horse that is too old to ride.

Standing still,

it is dying,

broken legs are fatal for horses. 

Sap is all that is left

of the branch that I used to climb on

the branch that was its back, thick as my thigh.  

A big barreled animal standing at 16.2 hands,

a tree as tall as me,

with a mane of needles 

I could use to find its breed, its species, its seedlings

unfolding into foals. 

I have loved

a tree that thought itself a horse.  I want

a blood bay horse again. 

Julia Rose Lewis is a working towards her MFA at Kingston University London.  She received her BA in Biology and Chemistry from Bryn Mawr College PA.  Her poetry incorporates philosophy of science, representations of illness, and climate change.  For her dissertation she is looking at the intersection of ecopoetics and queer theory.  When not in school, she is living on Nantucket Island.  She is a member of the Moors Poetry Collective of Nantucket.  Her poems have appeared in their second and third anthologies, Lemmon Hummus and Tips on Throwing a Housewarming Party in a Small Space.