Poetry by Susanna Schantz

Susanna Schantz is the recipient of the 2026 Juniper Literary Prize for her debut collection Sign Broken, Message Inside (University of Massachusetts Press, 2027). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Common, dadakuku, Abridged Magazine, PHIL LIT, coastlines review: a journal of docupoetics, La Piccioletta Barca, Sein und Werden, The Humanist, and elsewhere. She is a former teacher for NYC schools for pregnant, parenting and unhoused teens and young men in the justice system, TRIO Programs, and the South Carolina Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities. A trained naturalist, she lives in South Carolina. Find her at hemicraniacontinua.com.

Carolina Wrens

One imagines he cocked his tail
before St. Paul's triple, but you
raise him an eyestripe, teakettling
as you finish a dome flipped
for a family, your final weave
an extension no less baroque
than St. Phillip's protruding portico,
Church Street's Anglo-Tuscan
translation, no less vistal terminus
than the lanterned steepletop, once
a lowcountry leading light, which,
one imagines, with a bit of longi-
tudinal latitude, might make
the old astronomer sing.

Poetic Justice

GO AWAY TRESPASSERS WILL BE VIOLATED,
private home sign, South Carolina

Were it not for the threat,
so intimate, so visceral,
so redundant, she would
have walked on by, not mal-
lingered before a fence needing
no narration to keep invasive
species away. She stops in tracks,
records of readers shaking their
heads at the compound's last word.
Our little life's a solo sport, insists
the sign, refusing all friendlies
even as its mounted defense scores
by own-goal offense, bringing
further footprints to the yard.