Jane Zwart

by Jane Zwart

for Rachel Martin

What the stranger gives is in a thousand ways less
than what our kin can give—for instance, names
and new names, nucleotides and years. And if,

between people who belong to one another, it is
not as simple as deserving, still: a lover will belly up
to a sink and wash your hair for only the asking,

but strangers you have to pay. In magnitude,
in recurrence, what we call love from these people
who are ours, it dwarves the love strangers give.

No one will carry you as long as your mother did.
No one will think your laughter quite the medal
your sons say it is. Yes, and for the handkerchief

a passer-by presses on your distress, there will be,
seven times over, your brother, his shirt front.

But there is something about the handkerchief,

something about the door held anonymously open
by someone not beholden to you at all. There is
something about trying not to be seen needing help

and being seen. And about the love that is altogether
unobliged, something. So that remembering it,
we toss out, like a ball too light to throw, the belief

that a woman—not a teacher, not a parent, followed
by a gust of winter into a grade school: she spent
her best wish on a child—was an angel, or like that.

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University and co-edits book review for Plume. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, HAD, and Ploughshares, and her first collection of poems is coming out with Orison Books in fall 2025. You can track her down at janezwart@bsky.social or janezwart.com.

by Jane Zwart

My dad complains that it is the same monsters
again and again. Almost everything, he says,
looks like an animal or a man. A dragon is a lizard,
a zombie the smear left of homo erectus.

There is so little in horror we cannot trace back
to an ordinary beast: shark, snake, doberman, bear.
Occasionally, the predator is mostly mouth,
of course, carnivorousness where speech should be,

rows of teeth at the opening of a tube that both
suctions and screams. But the best monsters
either look like us or like the dark churn
of something more gray than age or smoke or ash.

The best monsters: like us or like a sky hungrier
than a mouth. My dad is not complaining, really,
about our shallow imaginations, about the sameness
of the creatures we conjure to scare ourselves.

His grievance is with humankind: we are voracious;
thus most of our monsters think us meat.
We are voracious; thus the unthinking thing: it swallows
us up in an unbeing even less fitful than death.

Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines. She frequently publishes book reviews and, with Timothy Liu, is co-editor of book reviews for Plume. She is on Twitter and Instagram @_janezwart_. Her website is janezwart.com.