Poetry by Sharon Ackerman

Sharon Perkins Ackerman lives in central Virginia. Her poems appear in the Southern Humanities Review, Atlanta Review, Salvation South, Kestrel, Meridian, Crab Orchard Review, and others. Her third poetry collection is Sweeping the Porch (Pine Row Press, 2026). She is poetry editor for Streetlight Magazine.

Evening Creek

A creek toward nightfall, does not sing
but testifies, in shout and script,
of what grows along its banks.
Fern and fronds playing the waves,
ripped and ransomed
and bound for mouths of oceans.
It’s not for love of water or moon
that we pause to listen, but flood—
that picks up the stray riders
in our veins and never has a name.
In my life, I have not loved
in quite the way I wanted, sigh drooping
willows, but that is only the stream’s
mischief, the way crawdads change
their minds, swim backwards.

Canning Days

I’ve heard it called idiot packaging,
the screw top that won’t turn,
splatter of juices as you
son-of-a-bitch it open. Or wrenching
in a push down and twist,
except down requires more
force than my kitchen hands
can conjure most mornings.
My mother was adept at canning,
a mistress of seals, steaming
jars of jelly or peaches,
sweet, syrupy lids whose pressure
breaks when you run a knife
under its lip. The child I was craved
that whoosh, the rush of sugar,
glass so bright our faces shone
in cabernet and sun gold tones.
We didn’t have words for this chore,
just a sureness that what we held
inside ourselves those days
was all clean, all good.

The Slipping Away of Late Winter

A raccoon is a bold creature
by every measure,
slow to git if he pays
you any mind at all.
Things are on the move
this time of year, even ice
has somewhere to go,
running off over hills to carve
ditches and fill creeks.
I stomp on the sidewalk
and see him lose a few
seeds as he turns. It’s hard to hold
onto things in this life,
if you ease up even a moment,
the mica gleam of fur
might slip by you in the moonlight.

The Space

Two fawn lie down
in rain we’ve been waiting for
all summer, hard showers

steaming the pasture
where two sets of ears
fluff up white,

delightful as new lambs.

All day they crowd the field
with a narrative
their own, like the secret

languages we once made up
in the dark. Late,

behind my window
they’ve gone
leaving a child’s empty room

the way we left ours at eighteen,
bodiless gap
in a wide acreage
to be filled in.