Bio
Jennifer Campbell is a writing professor in Buffalo, NY, and a co-editor of Earth’s Daughters. She has two poetry collections, Supposed to Love (Saddle Road Press) and Driving Straight Through (FootHills), and a chapbook of reconstituted fairytale poems called What Came First (Dancing Girl Press, 2021). Jennifer’s work has recently appeared in American Journal of Nursing, Bacopa Literary Review, NOVUS, ArLiJo, and Crosswinds Poetry Contest issue.
Trigger Warning
I hereby grant you permission
to leave walls and structure behind,
to join toes to the sand, realize
the fruitlessness of holding down
a shell with toe or finger, trying
to mark the spot of a tiny shark tooth
before the tide draws it away.
Permission to slip between months,
feeling summer temptations
when spring hasn’t yet grounded
the north. Permission to love
the liminal spaces, to enter
the larger world where sickness
is often cured best with light.
In class you learned we ingest
a weekly amount of microplastics
equivalent to a credit card,
chemical compounds
invading a sacred environment—
foreign elements not suited
to the organism’s survival.
Today the red tide flips back
dead fish. They crowd the shore
and tourists cough back a reply.
You leave with pastel shells,
shark teeth smoothed to mirrored glass,
surprised at how closely beauty
and destruction coexist.