Want
By Jennifer Stewart Miller
My dog wants to run off into the lit trees, my 87-year-old mother wants to live on. To a hungry goldfinch, want is huge— and as tiny as a thistle seed. I wanted to visit the hidden smallpox cemetery in Provincetown again, so in fall I drove, then hiked through woods, then slipped and slid down a steep hill to kneel at these little numbered marble slabs. I have been found wanting. I have been left wanting. My wants have been distilled. Fourteen souls carried off in outbreaks— I longed to find this place, all the wanting buried here. This plush dark moss, these whole and broken stones. My wants are small like this.
Jennifer Stewart Miller’s book Thief (2021) won the Grayson Books Poetry Prize. She’s also the author of a chapbook, The Strangers Burial Ground (Seven Kitchens Press, 2020). Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appeared in Poet Lore, RHINO, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, and elsewhere.
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There is so much in this poem leading us to those final, devastating wants.