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FOUR WAY REVIEW

Jennifer Funk is a recovering Californian currently trying to prove she has enough salt to make it as a yankee. She is a graduate of Warren Wilson's MFA Program for Writers and a current student of Lesley University's Counseling Psychology Masters' Program. A scholarship recipient for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference and The Frost Place, Jennifer's work can found be at ROAR, the newsletter SWWIM, and elsewhere amongst the interwebs.

CONSENT by Jennifer Funk

Thursday, 15 November 2018 by Jennifer Funk

As if you could dig it up like a carrot
or shake it loose from the branches.  

As if you could thwack it in half
like a coconut, could drink the milk

sloshing inside and be revived, as if you could command it
onto your tongue, as if it had a taste,

as if it could be poured or caught or captured or held
or worried loose like a tooth, a knot, a nail, as if it were an eye

fixed on a snake bisecting the path.  
As if it could be summoned and hooded,  

cut and partitioned: this: meat. This: poison. Many times

there was only the bright smell of gin
on my mouth and the butterscotch glow 

of stupid I must have been haloed in, the sudden
seizure of my bitter orange and juniper tongue. Desire,

yes, also, urgency. But I could be
caught, I could be lightning

directed, flash inanimate. Out beyond
these walls, a ferocious wind

makes love to the trees in a yard,
pine needles scattering all over

the green, green ground. I want to say
I never assented to any role I was not fully certain I could sell,

but I, too, am susceptible to the suspicion I should be
dumb and grateful, like a cow or a potted plant.
 

Jennifer FunkpoemPoetry
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  • Published in Issue 14
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