Sonnet as Soft Form
by Jane Huffman

​You cannot make a cabinet
out of sadness.
 
You cannot make a show of it:
sadness as gazing ball (i.e., garden
globe, lawn orb.)
 
I had sadness by the short hairs,
loved the proverbial much-older
man, in image and idea.
 
The image: the tin roof, the heat.
The idea: the cat.
 
In other words, there’s the cowboy,
there’s the sadness of the land,
 
and then there’s the cow—  
​

Jane Huffman has an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is editor-in-chief of Guesthouse, an online literary journal. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, The Los Angeles Review, FIELD, New South, TYPO and elsewhere.  She lives in Iowa City, IA, where she teaches writing at the University of Iowa and works as a bookseller at Prairie Lights. Twitter @janechuffman

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June 2018

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