Like the most aerial of birds, the heart breaks into a day
all by itself, nearly a perfect thing, though it skims so much
along the way, reads and rides patterns in wind—
Not that you can tell it to do anything at all, yet you tell it
what you have not told anyone, little by little, as if wanting
to be rescued, call it a wishfulness, or a light in which you
believe you can move. Such are its wonders, the heart
swimming closely by your side, dipping under the blue fringe
of morning, choosing the only deep region it’s ever known.
We can be made whole again. Let everything listening know it.
Give with each breath the beginning of your self, made ready
when you wake—take up little chores just as your mother once gave you—
wake again and enter new, this day, the ever-blue ordinance of it.
Jody Rambo’s full-length manuscript Undaughtering was recently selected as a Finalist for the inaugural Wesleyan University Press Cardinal Poetry Prize, judged by Robert Pinsky in 2024. Her chapbook, Tethering World, won the Wick Open Chapbook Prize and was published by Kent State UP. Her poems have appeared in Best New Poets, Poetry International, North American Review, Gulf Coast, Barrow Street, Colorado Review, Verse Daily, Fourteen Hills, Blackbird, Notre Dame Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She has received several Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Awards, a Vermont Studio Center Residency Fellowship, and a Jerome Foundation Travel & Study Grant in Literature. Her work has been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize. A more complete list of her publications and awards is available at jodyrambo.com.