Jules Jacob and Sonja Johanson

Crow Poison
February 28, 2022 and Sonja Johanson Jules Jacob

                                      Crow Poison
                                      Amianthium muscitoxicum
 

The sheep
stumbled drunkenly
before dying,
 
stagger grass
found in the corner
pasture     grazed upon.
 
Mother wept,
the meat ruined.
Not even maggots
 
would touch the mutton.
The wool still good,
but it came to more
 
than shearing.
She made us dig
the sickly bulbs
 
and burn them.
They could
have stopped the itching.
 
I would have hung
them in the house
for fly paper.

Jules Jacob is a poet and child advocate who often writes about dichotomous conditions among humans and nature. Her work is featured in journals and anthologies including PlumePlume Poetry 8Rust + MothGlass: A Journal of PoetryThe Fourth River, and elsewhere. She’s the author of The Glass Sponge (Finishing Line Press) and recipient of a fellowship from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Moulin à Nef in France. Jules reads for Lily Poetry Review and can be found at julesjacob.com

 

Sonja Johanson is a New England poet whose work focuses on ecology and feminism. She has work appearing in numerous journals and anthologies, including American Life in Poetry, BOAAT, Mid-American Review, Poet Lore, THRUSH, and the Best American Poetry blog, and has served as a contributing editor at the Found Poetry Review and Eastern Iowa Review. Sonja is the author of three chapbooks: Impossible Dovetail (IDES, Silver Birch Press), all those ragged scars (Choose the Sword Press), and Trees in Our Dooryards (Redbird Chapbooks).  Sonja divides her time between work in Massachusetts and her home in the mountains of western Maine.