ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Joannie Stangeland is the author of several collections, including The Scene You See (Ravenna Press). Her poems have also appeared in The Pedestal Magazine, New England Review, Purr and Yowl: An Anthology of Poetry about Cats, and other journals and anthologies. Joannie holds an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop.
Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry:
Sketch in Blue with Darker Water
May 6, 2026
With a Forecast for More
If summer crowded the roadsides
with dusty umbels, the Queen Anne’s lace
a frilly garden party dress or antique
handwork from a yard sale,
fall wields the rain’s steady hammers,
constructs the strange comfort I find
in watching the creek swell—not a flood,
but a feeling rushed between the banks.
If we keep our eyes on the rivers,
will our grief be ferried downstream,
or is this feeling a hole sunk in mud,
a scar that mars the morning
the way rain scribbles down windows
and blurs the glass, the way a word
can wound the silence in a room?
Or is the silence the wound?
The wild carrot now crumples, clouds
of withered fists, ghost homes.
I began "With a Forecast for More," when I would each fall send a poem that explored grief to an also-grieving friend, by writing in response to Vénus Khoury-Ghata's line "Her dreams follow the rain's trajectory."* As time continues to change my relationship to loss, this poem changed through years of revisions before finding itself.
*Khoury-Ghata, Vénus, "Interments," translated by Marilyn Hacker, Nettles, Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, MN, 2008
Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published weekly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
