The Sisters as Sisters by Jordan Windholz


 
 
Their hearts of glass filled with sand, their dunes sculpted by the blood’s shifting winds. Their hearts
of blood brined in salt, their tides the swells of tearless mothers who would not turn from
catastrophe. Each had a story they would tell of each other. Each had a story they would tell of
themselves. Each had a story they would not tell, a kind of melody played on the brain’s clavier.
They knew each other as strangers know the city they share, how one morning a season shifts, a
street cools beneath an autumn evening’s fog. How after it rains, you open a window. They knew
each other like neighbors listening to each other through the wall, their ears like lips kissing. They
knew each other like playing children understand each other as familiars, how, as in the middle of
playing pretend, they become a house their names can properly haunt, how, in that moment, a
movement of light they might name an hour.
 
 
 
Jordan Windholz is the author of Other Psalms (UNT Press, 2015), which won the 2014 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry. His poems have appeared in Barrow Street, Diagram, 32poems, and Gold Wake Live, among other publications. He is an assistant professor of English at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, where he teaches courses on renaissance British literature, creative writing, and technical and professional writing. His scholarly work has been published or is forthcoming in English Literary Renaissance, Modern Philology, Humanities, and Profession. You can find him online at www.jordanwindholz.com and on Twitter @jwindholz.