by Jane Zwart

The first time someone calls me
an adult child, I feel it, perfect
and discomfiting, I’m out of my depth
in autonomy, and I’m an amazon
pointed to a nursery school chair.
Adult child, someone says,

and I think of my friend’s mom.
In her childhood, she had I don’t know
how many cavities—one too many—
so her parents, weary of paying
the dentist, paid the dentist
to pull all her teeth. There’s more:

into her forties, this woman wore
the same outgrown maw, a set
of miniature dentures. I think of her,
savoring the unsuitable littleness
of her trick teeth, and I remember
the advance I received on my grin,

on my mother’s incisors, white doors
waiting to be hung. We’re all miscast:
some of us as a kid who can’t grow
into her mouth and some as a woman
issuing orders from a porcelain
apparatus too dinky for authority.

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Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University and co-edits book review for Plume. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, and The Nation. Her first collection, Oddest & Oldest & Saddest & Best, came out with Orison Books in February 2026.

by Jane Zwart

Almost always it is widows
trying the windchimes.

From technique you can tell
who played tetherball

and which ones flattered
men in uniform, brushing

their shirt fronts free of crumbs.
A few pretend they are there

to buy. Methodical as hand models,
they lift the price tags tied

to bamboo chandeliers
before filling the store

with reports of puppet kendo.
Others start small, browsing

a finger across pipes
sawed from dollhouse organs.

And then there are those
who look both ways before

they swing floating smoke stacks
with whole belfries for echoes.

Sometimes, one says, it’s a relief
being unable to predict

the magnitude of the sound
you’re about to set ringing.

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Jane Zwart teaches at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The Southern Review, Threepenny Review, TriQuarterly, and Ploughshares, as well as other journals and magazines.

by Jane Zwart

If it were me blindfolded, I would fumble the honeydew too,
but Sarah’s aunts, formidable, do not let their charges roll.
Cindy pins and denudes a decorative gourd. I swear she is set
on scouring the warts from the squash along with its Jiff spackle.

Anyway she has not even reached for a diaper when Mary mugs
with her Pampered cantaloupe. She holds the fruit with two hands.

Sarah, though, lets go her clingstone to clap and it rolls, it cracks
at her feet.

I am not the kind of mother I wish I were,
the kind to hear a melon open against the ground and laugh.
The kind to sit down on the lawn, a hemisphere of summer in my lap
and a picnicker’s spoon in my hand.

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Jane Zwart teaches Engilsh at Calvin University, where she also co-directs the Calvin Center for Faith & Writing. Her poems have previously appeared in Poetry, TriQuarterly, and Threepenny Review, as well as other magazines.