Somonka by Jenna Le
Associate editor Sally Geiger on today’s bonus poem: “Somonka” is an interspecies dialogue, two love notes from two beings who cannot or will not come together again. The poem asks how we can love one another through passive aggression and impossible demands, and comes away with a poetic union that offers the reader as much as its two voices ask of one another.
Somonka
Come gloat once more
on my windowsill: the grooves
your talons gouged
in the wood-grain have grown
less sharp as the gray years go.
Prove this is no prank.
I enclose in this letter
a peach-pit. Plant it;
the first grub that gorges
will guide you to my door.
Jenna Le (jennalewriting.com) is the author of Six Rivers (NYQ Books 2011), A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books 2017), a second-place winner in the Elgin Awards, and Manatee Lagoon (forthcoming from Acre Books 2022). Her poetry appears in AGNI, Denver Quarterly, Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Pleiades, Poet Lore, Verse Daily, and West Branch.
