The Unmown Field

By Emily Tuszynska
Fall 2019 | Poetry

Fifteen years and even I

who watched every season

of its changing can no longer

remember the field

that’s grown over.

Sheltered by snow-toppled

grasses, the green shoots

of trees hardened,

and by the first June

red cedars tongued

the air above bluestem.

Nothing lasts. Not the field,

not my girlhood, not the baby

I carried until the next came

behind him. Now my daughter

is the one who is young,

and already too heavy

to carry. Doves croon

to her from new pines

as they did from the pines

of my childhood. The sorrow

in their song is the sorrow

of the human listener,

old sorrow that somehow

I knew even then.

Emily Tuszynska’s poetry can be found in many journals, recently including The Georgia Review, Poetry Northwest, The Southern Review, and Water-Stone Review. She lives with her family in Virginia, just outside Washington DC.

Other Works

Jake Skeets Interview

by Sean Sam

... Poetry can be a way through because poetry asks for intense scrutiny. I feel like poetry is the key to unlocking a depth to English that our society erases ...

Falling Off the Edge of Nebraska

by Jack Livingston

... There was always something unsettling and unsaid about my sister. Things I would never understand. If my main emotions were daydreaming and anxiety, hers by contrast were humor and aggression. But on this trip, we are in sync ...