The Story That Needs You

After Emily Bernard
A mother’s blackberry heart ferments,
juices. It’s not that her voice jellies.
It’s that she’s beholden to therapy for sixteen-year-olds.
Cliff she can’t help. Lick she can’t taste.
The whir of the question: Do fathers get asked
what their children think of their work? No
clouds, no brambled bush, no story.

Author of the article

Ivy Raff is the author of Rooted and Reduced to Dust (Finishing Line Press, forthcoming 2024), hailed by Jimmy Santiago Baca as “sensuous, glowing with an undercarriage of mystique,” and What Remains (Editorial DALYA, Spanish translation forthcoming 2024), finalist for the Alberola International Poetry Prize. Ivy’s poetry appears in The American Journal of Poetry, Nimrod International Journal, and West Trade Review, among numerous others, and is anthologized in Spectrum: Poetry Celebrating Identity. Ivy’s Best of the Net-nominated work has garnered scholarship support from the Colgate Writers’ Conference and the Hudson Valley Writers Center, as well as residencies with Atlantic Center for the Arts and Alaska State Parks. She serves on the editorial staff of Reckoning, a literary journal on environmental justice. Read more at ivyraff.com.