Birds of Paradise
“Heaven is waiting: a pair of snow / leopards guard the entrance in sculpted marble and obsidian, each coiled round the other, muscles / tensed and ready. I open the door.”
Jenevieve Carlyn is a poet and historical writer in New England. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in The Examined Life, Parabola, River Heron’s “Poems, for Now,” Sage Magazine from Yale’s School of the Environment, The Madrid Review, Relief, and elsewhere, including the anthology In the Garden: Community Storytelling on Food, Ecology, & Place (Torrey House Press). She won the 2023 Thomas Merton Prize in Poetry of the Sacred and the Connecticut Poet Laureate Award for Eco-Poetry, was a finalist for Palette Poetry’s 2025 Love & Eros Prize, was shortlisted in the Artemesia Arts Contest, and highly commended in Mist & Mountain’s Competition on the 2025 theme of Peace. She is working on her first collection. Her website is jenevievecarlyn.com
“Heaven is waiting: a pair of snow / leopards guard the entrance in sculpted marble and obsidian, each coiled round the other, muscles / tensed and ready. I open the door.”