Jennifer Dorner

Elegy with Black Sand

 
         for my cousin

The car totals your body.
Your clothes in a plastic bag.

No one has a job to do
save this machine

forcing your breath. Inside
the coma, you are trying

to say yes to coming back
to your life. Everyone asks

how you are and there are only
so many ways to say dying.

Your mother asks others
to wire money

for a plane ticket, and then,
for your funeral.

My only memory of you is your
long dark hair falling

into sun. Flecks
of gold in black sand

like the nuggets our fathers
believed in.

Jennifer Dorner's poetry has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Cirque, Cloudbank, New Ohio Review, San Pedro River Review, Sugar House Review, The Inflectionist Review, The Timberline Review, and other journals. In 2019, her poems placed 1st in Willamette Writers Kay Snow Award for Poetry as well as 1st in two of Oregon Poetry Association's spring contests. She received her MFA from Pacific University in 2020.