Jane McKinley

Poetry

Jane McKinley is a Baroque oboist with degrees in music from Northwestern University and Princeton University. She is the author of Vanitas, winner of the 2011 Walt McDonald First-Book Award (Texas Tech University Press). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Georgia Review, Five Points, The Southern Review, Great River Review, Tar River Poetry, ONE ART, Able Muse, 2River View, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. In March she was awarded a 2023 Fellowship by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. She lives in Hopewell, New Jersey.

 

Depression, Early January

After mild days, snowdrops, a blue-black curtain falls. In minutes, the air blows cold, shutters bang, and dead leaves rise up. They call this madness a blue norther, this squall unloosing rain, sleet, snow, and hail as if the gods were dithering. Then it’s over. Nothing to measure but mercury dropping, sky the blue of alpine gentians. I thought this blue might lead me someplace else. I keep walking that way. There’s no end in sight.

“ On a January morning in 2012, I experienced the strange weather phenomenon described in the poem. Later that day I heard it referred to as a blue norther'. The name intrigued me and the following morning I started writing, eventually ending up somewhere out on the Great Plains, where the name comes from. Years later, in a poetry workshop, we were asked to take an unsuccessful poem and cut it to its essence, then to think of the truncated poem as a metaphor for something unrelated and use that as a title. Last year, while revising poems for a second collection, I decided to reinstate the final three lines from my earlier drafts. ”

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