> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.journal.ninthheaven.co/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # The Dogwood + 7 poems by Elise Powers - URL: https://www.journal.ninthheaven.co/literature/poem-the-dogwood-7-poems-by-elise-powers/ - Published: 2025-11-07T21:00:12.000Z - Updated: 2026-07-13T15:26:18.000Z - Description: 8 poems, each exploring the intersections of memory, tenderness, and the sacred ordinary. - Author: Elise Powers - Tags: Literature & Poetry, Poetry, Issue II - Blue Spring ## The Dogwood It’s early June and every morning the dogwood, a cumulus of fluffy white flowers outside my bedroom window, fools me into thinking it has snowed. Funny, how the mind’s branches bend toward what it knows— sees piles of white and thinks winter, hears silence and thinks absence. How happiness, if it arrives too gently— weightless as a hummingbird perched on the spire of the world— can feel like a sleight of heart. ## Stones Beneath the Sand While walking the beach, I heard an old man say to his friend, I mean, I’m still grieving over my high school sweetheart. It wasn’t a confession, but a fact—clear as the waves are restless, breaking like breath. His friend didn’t answer right away, simply nodded, like of course, of course some things stay and settle deep, stones beneath the sand that shape the shore. Meanwhile, the ocean folds itself over like an endless blanket, clearing the strand, then bringing it all back. ## The Lilacs Are in Bloom and once again I am reminded how every perfect thing— the tiny, four-petaled florets, watercolored together in dribbling lavender plumes; the sweet, milky scent of my daughter’s newborn breath, the robin’s-egg weight of her so impossibly light on my chest; the flutter of inspiration, breathtaking as a butterfly migration, passing through only when you’re lucky enough to find yourself in its path— is perfect not in spite of its brevity but because of it, because it urges us to pay attention, to hold it with two trembling hands, to feel the beauty and the loss all at once. ## Even Here I watch from the corner chair as you kiss your grandma’s forehead, your thumb stroking her hairline with a tenderness that stings my eyes; watch as you remind her of all the times she played catch with you in the Seattle rain, how much those wet afternoons meant, how you’ll do the same with your kids; watch as you press your cheek to hers, whispering I love yous and thank yous; watch the way your eyelashes flicker like candlewicks in a gentle wind when you don’t know what to say, when you study her face each time she closes her eyes; and I understand, seeing love laid bare like this, spread across the room like all those Christmas dinners crammed into her basement— folding tables end to end, mismatched tablecloths from years past— that sorrow this full is only possible because love made a home there first, passed from hand to hand like a warm plate. How even here, it keeps feeding us. ## I Am Eating a Handful of Figs and I think about how I can’t eat a fig without also eating a fig wasp. I pinch each swollen bell in two, autopsy the punch-berry guts for wings or antennae or a black and amber ghost. I do this—live my life like I might bite into a stinger. Better safe than sorry, I hear myself saying. But the thing about figs is they aren’t meant to be eaten cautiously— so worried about the potential yuck you never taste the sweetness. This, too, is how I’ve approached so many of life’s sweetnesses: splitting them open to inspect for loss before letting the juice touch my tongue. It’s not that I want to be afraid— only that I’ve spent so long bracing for sorrow I’ve forgotten how to recognize joy. Still, I want to trust the fruit. I want to eat the whole fig, wasp and all. ## Humans Are the Only Species Known to Blush Despite the great lengths we pace to appear calm and composed, our thin skins of need betray us in tenderness, as if the plague of apathy never reached the blood, as if the mutinous emotions simmering beneath the surface can’t help but revolt against the guarding of the heart, a flare of vulnerability shot straight through the shell like a warning or a prayer— a rose flush of I’m still here, a chest rush of I care, I care. ## A Broken Rule I learned that people were never meant to see their own faces and now every mirror feels like a broken rule, a door swung open to a room I was never supposed to enter. The thing is, a swallow does not glimpse herself mid-flight and spend the rest of the day smoothing her feathers or questioning the grace of her swoop, and I was never meant to witness the curve of dark brown pores that frame my aquiline nose, or the precise way my mouth folds around a name. What good does it do me to see that my features are not perfectly symmetrical? I have memorized myself too well, learned my face more intimately than my mother’s, my sister’s, my lover’s, when I was only supposed to see my own eyes reflected back through shining pond water— existing in motion, in laughter, in breath, then vanishing from myself the moment a fish breaks the surface, swallowing my vanity whole before I drown in it. ## Orogenesis I forgot to buy paper plates, so dishes pile in the sink, one on top of another on top of another, sliding and colliding, a convergence of all our busy lives. The night grows longer and the mountain taller, evidence that we are too together to worry about the mess, just as we should be, if only for a few hours. --- *Elise Powers received a BA in English Literature from Western Washington University. Her poems reflect on identity, womanhood, and the ordinary moments that make up a life. Her work has appeared in literary magazines and anthologies including Gather and Only Poems, and has been shortlisted for the Central Avenue Poetry Prize, awarded second place in the Black Horse Review Poetry Contest, and nominated for the Best of the Net Anthology. Her debut poetry collection, The Size of Your Joy, is forthcoming from Central Avenue Publishing in spring 2026\. She lives in Seattle with her husband and daughter, where she writes, collects sea glass, and savors life’s tender joys. Find more of her work on Instagram @elisepowerspoet and on Substack at Two Raw Sugars.*