‘night bloom’ by Jennifer Pons

maybe atom and adam are firsts
of all stories

All poems are landscapes with their own firmaments, ranges and back roads. Jennifer Pons’ new poem ‘night bloom’ is sensual and vivid in its memory recall, as seen in the back-and-forth-ing of such lines as “when I stroll city streets… / every moment I am awake”. Touch and distance, two normally opposing subjects, work in tandem through every stanza without rest: “across tongue and space / flipping inside the mouth”. When I think of longing, I think of sentimentality, but Pons masterfully avoids that cliché and cheap feeling with solid words like “nuclear”, “plastic”, and “metal” alongside words from our natural world. ‘night bloom’ is a poem without stopping (literally, there is no punctuation) and shines like a “starry deep night”.

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