Rachel J. Bennett grew up in Rock Island, Illinois. She received a BA in English from Grinnell College and studied at Trinity College, Dublin, as part of the University of Iowa’s Irish Writing Program. She pursues poetry without an MFA. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Big Lucks, BOAAT, Bodega, Five Quarterly, Pith, Really System, Salt Hill Journal, Similar:Peaks::, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Rattle, Sixth Finch, Spittoon, and Vinyl Poetry. She has won awards through Bayou Magazine and Smartish Pace and been a Poet of the Week through Brooklyn Poets. Her grandparents brought her to New York City when she was 10, and she knew she would find a way back.
Farewell, Antarctica
Floating is both
less and more than
our hopes for it.
Here is the foregone death
that sees our own, fortunes
read in milk crates,
teeth and wedding bands.
Seas rising to cover
the things we couldn’t take.
Familiar, lost
shapes: a man,
a woman recumbent
beneath a white sheet.
He turning back to see
her organs laid bare.
Like and unlike all the rest.
One scientist points
to an unmoored iceberg
that could fill the Nile
for seventy-five years.
The universe dreams
to our dreams, says another.