Jeanne Bryner was born in Appalachia and grew up in Newton Falls, Ohio. A practicing registered nurse, she is a graduate of Trumbull Memorial’s School of Nursing and Kent State University’s Honors College. She has received writing fellowships from Bucknell University, the Ohio Arts Council (1997, 2007), and Vermont Studio Center. Her poetry has been adapted for the stage and performed in Ohio, West Virginia, New York, Kentucky, and Edinburgh, Scotland. With the support of Hiram College’s Center for Literature, Medicine, and Biomedical Humanities, her nursing poetry has been adapted for the stage and performed by Verb Ballets, Cleveland, Ohio. She has a new play, Foxglove Canyon, and her books in print are Breathless, Blind Horse: Poems, Eclipse: Stories, Tenderly Lift Me: Nurses Honored, Celebrated and Remembered, No Matter How Many Windows, The Wedding of Miss Meredith Mouse, and Smoke: Poems, which received an American Journal of Nursing 2012 Book of the Year Award.
Behind our homes a road liesit suffers like a patch of skin alteredby its rash, a scarred spine, yearsof combined ruts. Aging fence linesborder the fields’ windswept grass. Retired from factory work,…