Issue 11: Winter 2017
The Winter 2017 issue of Mangrove Journal is an online-only edition. Print books of select Spring issues are available on the University of Miami Coral Gables campus for a suggested donation of $5-$10 to the Creative Writing Program. Please contact mangrovejournal@gmail.com for more information.
The Art of Passing
Here's to you, white oak,
You who held together last November
On a college campus in the middle of everything.
The leaves and their music have risen
Toward a new mythos, a new panacea.
Rise behind. The sodden earth devours our shipwrecks,
What were once slow collisions aboard the soul,
Trembling against a swatch of day.
My friend gives a philosophy lesson
That becomes more than a sad freshman's coffeehouse prattle.
He accuses me of nihilism. Your problem, he says,
Is that you don't believe in an afterlife.
The tree and the apple are turning
Green to gold to red,
The flowers have bloomed out of their sockets,
My shadow scuttles along the wall.
At night the old piano carries Debussy
Like an ant towing a hearse.
The moon lies on the floor,
Having floated out of its color and lost its way.
It will never remember. None of those barren shapes or songs
Remembers anything.
White oak, white oak,
Lay down your shadow.
You and your roots, your buried bones—
Two magnets in and on the soil.
And though the clouds and all are running
Toward their own dreams and artifice,
I have kept myself alive by believing
That time doesn't exist.
Jenny Wu
Jenny Wu is an undergraduate at Emory University, graduating in 2016. She is
pursuing a double-major in English literature and art history. Her previously
published work can be found in the Spring 2012 issue of storySouth magazine.
