Landscape with Pink Hats                                                                               —Jennifer Bullis


You are a diagnosis and pill, 
a globe and its mountain, a mountain and its pine. 
A tide and a current, a river with ears— 
I step to your bank. It’s a law: 
energy passing through a system
reorders the system
along the path of energy. 
I was a bereft leftie, crying
in my Prius. Now, I’m hybrid, 
a curve with a point. 
A woman is always more
than the sum of her body parts. 
Did I say weapon? River: 
you've sprouted a claw. 


Jennifer Bullis

Jennifer Bullis is author of the chapbook Impossible Lessons (MoonPath Press). Her poems and essays appear in Under a Warm Green Linden, Tinderbox, Water~Stone Review, Terrain.orgTahoma, and Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse. Her manuscript The Tongue of Narcissus, which contains “Landscape with Pink Hats,” was a finalist for the 2018 Brittingham & Pollak Prizes. She earned a Ph.D. in English at University of California, Davis, and lives in Bellingham, Washington, where she taught college writing and literature for 14 years. Currently she is librettist for a cantata in the voices of the mythical Sirens, to be performed by Seattle Baroque Orchestra and Burning River Baroque of Cleveland in 2019–2020.

ISSN 2472-338X
© 2018