Jenna Le | Women who Conjure Owls | Poets Resist

Jenna Le authored Six Rivers (NYQ Books, 2011) and A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora (Indolent Books, 2018), which won Second Place in the Elgin Awards. She was selected by Marilyn Nelson as winner of Poetry By The Sea’s inaugural sonnet competition. Her poetry appears in Los Angeles Review, Massachusetts Review, and West Branch.

Jenna Le’s Website.

Also by Jenna Le: Six Rivers A History of the Cetacean American Diaspora A Radiologist’s Ghazal

Poets Resist
Edited by Benjamin Rozzi
May 26, 2019

Jenna Le

Women who Conjure Owls

Easter 2019 1. They peeled her newborn from the slick of sweat that sheened the light tan insides of her arms and sent her a thousand miles away to fret the next three years inside a locked, alarm- rigged T.B. hospital. The baby was given up for adoption; later, she was informed by nasal voices that her elder children died of disease while she was quarantined. Riding on Mother Owl depicts a coven of birds with human eyes, a gravel-skinned owl-matriarch, two coal-red hatchlings balanced upon her shoulders, coasting on the wind so effortlessly that her spread black talons seem to be standing still on soundless snow. 2. Today is Easter Sunday. I sit reading web articles about the Inuit workshops at Kinngait. Many of their leading artists are women, thumb-webs gray with grit as they etch copper blocks with nitric acid, or chisel shadows into stone, or treat smooth lithographic plates with sticky wax. Kenojuak Ashevak’s dad, I learn, was killed when she was scarcely six, caught in a clash between those like himself who knew the skill of channeling the spirits and those who adhered to Christian tenets. In Oakville, the stained glass window she designed: an owl feeds multitudes with one shared fish, ice-blue. 3. In Following the Route, an oversized owl, black plumes specked with small white dots, looks straight ahead with goat-like oblong eyes fixed on his bourn. He oars a dark blue boat, his only passenger a frowning seal. Nikotai Mills, I think I know the route he’s following, this ramrod-postured owl who doesn’t need to fly to get to where he’s going and who graciously takes fares. But teach me what ecstatic notes unspool from the accordion held by the fat white owl with massive biceps who sits square athwart your print Bird Song. Why does he play, not sing? Why’s his accordion red — with what?