“Aunt Theresa” by Olena Jennings
We drank a beer at the local pub,
then ran our fingers over the names
in the family bible.
It is like this when you retrace
steps you’ve never walked.
In her farmhouse we feel
the wooden structure around us,
draft or summer breeze.
They told stories in their accents
as if they had come a great distance.
There was the gray perm,
her pink polyester pants
as she moved through the kitchen,
the kittens
I was suddenly allergic to.
They squirmed in my palm
like the past
I was not ready for.
It is almost impossible to balance
someone else’s with my own.
Later, the sun poured over our shoulders
as we read our name
on the grave stones.
We have grown
like dandelions in the town.
Our milky insides
pour out
to feed the kittens.
Our hair blows
to fertilize the earth.
We remember the farmhouse:
bathtub in the kitchen,
chair with the cushion,
apple pie baking,
the past that gives way.
Artist’s Statement
I often build my poetry on a foundation of truth. Sometimes the truth comes in the form of photos and sometimes in the form of a memory. Memory is important, other people’s as well as my own. I think about the parts of other lives that I have heard about so much that they have become my own memories. I think about the less tangible aspects of memory that come in the form of a simple emotion.
My poetry is about connections. Small events weave themselves together in ways that are unexpected to me. When I see the connection, I have made the poem.
In my poetry, I explore Ukrainian cultural identity. I have also begun to explore my identity on my father’s side as I do in these two poems that highlight rural Canadian life in the town of Sheenboro, Quebec.
Olena Jennings is the author of the poetry collection The Age of Secrets (Lost Horse Press), the chapbook Memory Project, and the novel Temporary Shelter (Cervena Barva Press). She is the translator or co-translator of collections by Ukrainian poets Kateryna Kalytko (co-translated with Oksana Lutsyshyna), Iryna Shuvalova, Vasyl Makhno, and Yuliya Musakovska. Her translation of Anna Malihon’s Girl with a Bullet is forthcoming in 2025 from World Poetry Books. She lives in Queens, New York where she founded and curates the Poets of Queens reading series and press.