Raised in Logan, Utah, Sunni Brown Wilkinson attended Utah State University, earning a BS in English. After completing an MFA in Poetry at Eastern Washington University, she returned to Utah to teach writing as an adjunct instructor at the University of Utah, Salt Lake Community College, and Weber State University. She has lived in the Ogden area for fifteen years now and continues to teach poetry, creative writing, and composition at Weber. Her work can be found in Crab Orchard Review, Adirondack Review, Sugar House Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, New Ohio Review and other journals and anthologies. She is the author of the poetry collection The Marriage of the Moon and the Field (Black Lawrence Press 2019), and her poem “Rodeo” won New Ohio Review’s inaugural NORward Poetry Prize in 2019. She currently lives in Pleasant View with her husband and three young sons.
Works
Canning Tomatoes, Late August
Canning Tomatoes, Late August
The West is burning,
Yosemite in ash,
smoke choking
blue sky
and all afternoon I’ve cleaned
jars, rim and round
belly, stuffed in mounds
of fleshy fires
the garden ignited
under green.
They’ll burn bright
in soups
all winter,
in sauces my boys
splatter on their mouths,
ruby smack
and long stained.
But now at the counter
they’re museum,
the freak exhibit:
one hundred hearts
packed, puzzle-like,
swollen tongues
of summer
severed,
apothecary charms
from a century
of plagues.
If I cut out
the breast
of the robin,
would it look
like this?
Pitched
crimson of poppies,
the shape and sheen
of bloody knuckles
of street fighters,
tucked and quivering?
Or the rooftops
of Salzburg
whose castle’s
torture chamber
made us shiver,
all that scarlet
hidden
between the floorboards
and masks,
cardinal sins
loud with telling.
How macabre
for such lightness!
I’ll confess
this:
I’m sick
with love for the rust
of each globe,
the way I cut
and plunge them
into jars the way
my mother did
when I was young
and she was happy
the first time
and the garden
said
yes
in red
red red.
First published in Juxtaprose.
Poem after Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe: Lent (chiffre 156) Peu A Peu
Poem after Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe: Lent (chiffre 156) Peu A Peu
Little by little the birds of paradise
wake up,
ruffle their papyrus–
thin and polychromatic
feathers, nuzzle
breast to breast, trill
into the light
that breaks
like water poured
into a pool stilled
by stars.
Now the day
opens and, exultant and fluid,
the birds take over
the sky.
Fig and bergamot.
Sweet lemon tree.
The impossible jewels
inside
and the birds coming.
There are lovers here,
their bodies like rivers,
like waterfalls.
Lovers like an altar burning
so predictably, their bodies
thin and wingless,
about to be broken.
I don’t want another love story.
I want immortality like this: beaked
and hungry, shucking
the fibrous shell of us,
the husk torn loose
and the seed glimmering.
Published in Adirondack Review.
A Pocket of Air in Irish Man’s Brain
A Pocket of Air in Irish Man’s Brain
“British doctors have called the case of ‘the man that lost (part of) his mind’
one of the strangest things they have ever seen.”
—Irish Central, March 13, 2018
In the news today doctors say
the old man’s brain is part circuitry,
part air. Three and a half inches
disappeared. A pocket there, empty,
a hole the size of an ice cream scoop,
an egg, a short-tailed shrew curled
and sleeping, the head of a dinner spoon.
No one knew til he grew dizzy, tingly,
only half his body moving,
like a lover reaching across the morning
to cold sheets, chickadees then the absence
of chickadees, party next to a quiet room.
In the x-ray, his brain is half a Valentine,
blank space on the left before unfolding
the heart, folded wings of a moth, missing ovary,
a pear and the shadow of a pear.
I want to write love notes in my best cursive,
fold them into butterflies and let them roost there,
tiny aviary, open womb. I want to whisper
my seventh grade secrets into that locker,
turn the dial til it clicks. Like the safety deposit
box my mother showed me in case she died,
the hidden bonds each light as air.
I want to bless the space
in that Irish man’s brain:
mysterious cloud, house of ghosts,
holy of holies, a hollow
like children’s hands cupped
for a caterpillar, cradle of the lost,
quiet as the cave we explored
in high school, knees to nose
crouched at the back and the boys
with their flashlights
switched off, their breath shallow,
close, and more than half
a heart pounding.
Published in Adirondack Review.
Autobiography with Birds
Autobiography with Birds
Willow Park shrouded in a dusk that hushed the monkeys. I heard the peacocks
shuffle their wild feathers, their tiny fires of noise like flamenco’s castanets.
Our family’s pet parrot learned to cry like my brother Riley.
Even when Riley was gone, we heard him crying all through the house.
Haircuts on the back porch and towels around our shoulders. Ears glistening.
One month later: robin’s nest rimmed with fine, white hair.
After winter, my father pruned the McIntosh the sparrows loved.
Their chittering high up like children playing house in a world of trees.
In the years of aloneness, my unborn children came diving,
drinking summer’s sweet dark under the bridge. I mistook them for swallows.
Fireweed, bicycle, Alaska. That summer the terns haunted one curve
in a gravel path. A nest in the rocks and a mother fighting for all her lives.
September, my son & I bury the limp finch in a shoebox filled with Black–eyed
Susans. We cradle its head a moment before the darkness comes.
Published in Gulf Stream.
Bibliography
- The Marriage of the Moon and the Field, Black Lawrence Press, 2019
