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92NY’s Goldman Center for Children and Family provides an exceptional array of programs designed to support children at every stage of their development.
Jenny George is the author of The Dream of Reason (Copper Canyon 2018), and her poems have appeared in FIELD, Ploughshares, Crab Orchard Review and elsewhere. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fund, the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Yaddo. Currently, she lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she serves as program coordinator for Hidden Leaf Foundation, a Buddhist-based social justice organization. She holds a BA in Human Ecology and an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
The poem and manuscript below were included in the printed program of the 2015 Discovery Winners’ Reading. “The Drowning” was first published by Ploughshares.
She sank and died—the girl
from out of town that summer.
They pulled her body
like waterweed, then winter came,
enclosed the lake in glass, and sealed
the dark cavern of our questions.
We skated on the frozen shell.
All around, the mountains glittered
chained in ice. The lake was pale blue
and cracked with stars—
We lay on our backs
acquiring a sense of the ordinary.
With the cold driving into our skulls
we watched our breaths rise
and vanish upwards into the depths.
