A Tour of East Colfax Avenue, Denver, Colorado, circa 1974

The New York Quarterly in 2022.

To wander East Colfax Avenue in the 1970s is to be young, female, angry and ripe, a June tomato planted early, reddens on the vine, splits open and bleeds. It runs down your leg and stains the street. You don’t stop, you don’t wipe, you let it remain, to remind us of the disappeared women, to remember Joan Little, the inmate who refused the guard in the prison kitchen with an ice pick. You stop to look in a storefront window between Race Street and Vine. It is Woman-to-Woman Bookstore, where more ideas are born on the stuffed sofa in the basement than there are books on the shelves. Sniff the fresh carpentry, leave late after Saba’s Judo class, stop by the Satire Lounge, sit on the kitchen side, where Flacco smothers burritos with sour cream and green chile and Linda serves it up. Watch out, the plate is hot. This is a time that exists in our mouths, the melting cheese of desire and the hot peppers of language. You are licking your fingers, young and inky. You are fired up Hey, hey ho ho, patriarchy has got to go. You are hawking our monthly newspaper at 9 th & Corona, Big Mama Rag, pages and pages of women on the rag, on the rage, on the Rag Mama Rag, her words, her glory and her size, the fact that she is alive and sells for twenty-five cents. An underground newspaper, literally, she has arisen from a basement on Gaylord Street. Once the FBI paid an informant to burgle that office, trash files, pour glue in your Smith Corona. It put Big Mama on the front page and our bad-ass Pat Schroeder pushed Congress to investigate. Now, forget Gaylord Street, and join the tour, take a right on Colfax with hundreds of others to Take Back the Night. Pass the porn parlor and the strip joints. After all, it is U.S. 40 in the city, and hey, there’s Sid King himself, egging on the hecklers, as a pack of dykes steps up to face them off—lavender tee shirts, tiny tits, tight jeans, uh uh uh uh uh. On your right, the immaculate Cathedral, as expected, turns its back on us as we march by, However you dress, wherever you go,yes means yes and no means no. But it needn’t have bothered, as each cross street disappears as we pass by on Colfax. We lead an invisible parade of passion and principles that marches still. Something that is a permanent marker on the asphalt, embossed on the avenue itself. It stains your fingertips after you read it, you can’t get it off you, why would you want to, why even try?

Ten Ways of Looking at the West

Sage Green Journal (http://sagegreenjournal.org/jacqueline-st.-joan.html)

I

I drive the canyons of the West

Deliberately,

The way I drag my finger between

The shoulder blades of the cat.

II

The earth fired this mountain

Before it was the West, before

Weber or Madison or Curtis

before Morrison or Mancos,

Dakota or Jurrasic.

III

Flaming Gorge ,

One gigantic rock

Sliced red on the diagonal,

Stacked from floor to

The heaven of the West.

IV

Was it in the West that I loved you?

Pre-Cambrian? Or before that?

Tonight I sleep at the edge of your canyon.

I listen to your starry wind.

V

Golden light of autumn

Wide, scattered rolls of hay

Shades of lavender and horses,

The sky and fences of the West.

VI

In the face of the wide open

Thighs of the West,

I am shy.

VII

I see the snow-capped sea monster

In the bony Western spine

Of a mountain range risen and resting.

VIII

Sweetwater.

Deer Lodge.

Steamboat Springs.

My tongue plays

The words of the West.

IX

All afternoon the crows

Are calling, racing around

The treetops of the West.

X

Bring the Western sky inside you

Peace is blue.

A Mother's Advice to her Children

Selected Poem from What Remains (Turkey Buzzard Press, 2016).

If you ever get the chance, live with an artist.

Live with an artist and you begin to notice

the shapes of things. 

Even the air around the enormous

sprig of forsythia

in the beer bottle,

the way its presence

makes the room fade away,

its relationship with the white wall,

its simple canvas.

Live with an artist and expect food

to slow cook all day

just for the odors of chiles,

the moisture in the kitchen

the falling apart of the meat inside the pot.

You needn't gather the cats.  They will find you.

Move in with an artist at least once.

Plant plenty of daffodils,

whatever you can afford. 

And study the light

all day and in every season

before you decide to do

much else.

Live with an artist. 

Stay as long as you can. 

Leave if you must, then live with

an accountant.

Third Place, The Colorado Lawyer Poetry Contest, 2006.

---

A POEM FROM THE BOOK WHAT REMAINS

Restraining Order

Selected Poem from What Remains (Turkey Buzzard Press, 2016).

I am watching the freckles

on the back of my fingers

multiply and divide like

lovers under the lens.  The

speaker at my podium

says:  He's my pimp.  Tore

a branch from a tree.   Beat

me.  The branch broke.

I am lifting the law books

down, a  browning obsolete

boulder older than I am,

the weight of a witness

of losses.  The letters of the

law chew on my fingernails,

and now she is saying:

Choked me  . . .  can't

remember the rest.

I am skin closed in

this chair in this black cloth

swallowing more water these days

staying tempered, staying cool,

a surgeon dusting her hands

for powder burns, and suddenly

I look at her, wide-eyed, broken: 

He shouted he'd

kill me.  I don't know if he will.

I am blotting the battered  bench

with a clawed Kleenex, aligning my

pencils just so.  She says justice.  She says

justice.  She says:  He dragged me by my hair. 

My head broke the mirror. 

Do you need to see the pictures? 

First Place, The Colorado Lawyer Poetry Contest, 2006.

---

A POEM FROM THE BOOK WHAT REMAINS.

White Rain

Although it is summer evening,

hair spray and Nescafé

smell so strong and familiar

it makes one wonder if it is morning or night.

In the tiny yellow bathroom,

the girl takes her seat facing

the wall full of tiles interlocking

like arms squaring to lift their black centers.

The mother untwists the rubber band

and a few strands snap.  She leans

her belly into the girl's spine. 

Lightly the amber brush, then

the wide speckled comb

untangle the limp brown hair.

The mother's hands smooth

the girl's skull, circle it at the crown,

wrap the red rubber band around the hank

quickly, perfectly, twice,

as if it were an entire plant of celery in her hands.

All is luminous:  approaching blonde.

Every Saturday the mother's Irish hands

pour the gold over the girl's head;

then the piercing scent of sliced lemons,

and a warm water veil

flows down from a white kitchen cup. 

The sun slants through the slats of the blinds,

falls on a thick lemon shell rocking

on its shiny pocked rind,

its soft white center slimy and spent.

The mother reaches for the slim girl

waiting on the back of the bottle.

She is my mother in a cotton housedress,

and I am the freckled eleven year old,

who, more than anything else

wants to be able to sleep over

an entire night at a friend's house,

without waking homesick in the inconsolable night:

Will you drive me home now please?

I worry that my mother is alone there. 

I have to get back to her.

I remember the brittle knots

ripped from the bristles of  those days, 

when your hands held my head

in the kitchen sink, my naked back cold and wet,

the sounds of water pounding,

my heavy head rocked slowly,

involuntarily, and looked up at you,

like it was someone else's head,

maybe your head,

turning, as it did years later

from the front seat of the car,

when you first saw your grandchild,

part black, part jew, part you--

six years old sitting next to me in the back seat,

her best dress tied with a wide blue ribbon. 

She was waiting to meet you, when,

smiling, you turned your gray head,

reached your hand back naturally to touch her,

and that same hand that washed my hair

recoiled from her nappy head like the snake

that lived under the screen porch

of your childhood where you pumped

the water from the cistern into the bucket,

the screen door slapped hard, twice

and  your younger sisters lined up

at the farmhouse sink every Saturday.

where you tied on your mother's bleached apron,

and washed them over and over

head after head, 

girl after girl

in the same white water,

careful not to waste the rain.

Honorable Mention, The Colorado Lawyer Poetry Contest, 2006.

a beautiful thing

Published in Mountain Talking, Fall, 2016 and Sage Green Journal

It is a beautiful thing to wake

in the dark chill of October

and go out into it

where a crescent moon

and two stars appear both ahead

and in the rear view mirror

before you even leave home

to sit on the floor with it

kneecap to kneecap

inhaling the dark clarinet

of your body

only the breath of the tires

the train’s long choo-choo

searching in the rubble of itself

your pounding throat, a bratty knee

a molecule of coffee still clinging

to the root of  your tongue

your eyelids lower now

and in front of you wrapped shoulders

of a robe folded with her empty hands

that her, that you, that teacher

with the one word lesson

Dead Baby

Published in The Denver Quarterly

There's a dead baby in your yard

the newsboy said when he knocked on the door.

It was over by the fence.  It was naked. It was blue. 

It was bloody placenta all over the ground

and red spots on the fence.  Red spots on the fence

led them over the top to the trail of blood

in the neighbor's yard

to the back door

and into the room

of a 13 year old, the childless mother

of the dead baby in the yard next door.

I heard a cry late last night,

a neighbor reported,

Thought it was a cat or a bird

What did she do alone in that room?

Teddy bear stuffed in her mouth?

Her legs pumping the mantra of a child

giving birth all alone:  Get rid of it,

 then wash up, no one will know

Did she rise up then

Get rid of it

and take the baby to the fence?

Go wash up, it's gone now, no one will know

it's over, we’re dying, wash up now,

it's gone over the fence . . .

There's a dead baby in your yard

the newsboy said when he knocked on the door.

It was over by the fence.

It was wrapped in slick papers

the Sunday supplement

multicolored  ink-stains

and bloody from the birth,

yellow rubber gloves flopped in a puddle,

man-sized gloves.  Playtex

what you use

to wash the whitewalls on tires

to strip furniture

to clean the oven

or to pull out a baby that doesn't want to come

when you don't know what you're doing

so you reach in and pull harder

and the head comes out and it's blue

and the cord's wrapped around

and you don't know what you're doing

and you reach in and pull harder

and the yellow gloves pull harder

and you're scared

and it's blue and we’re dying,

so you reach for the Parade section

and roll the baby in it

and you don't know what you're doing

and you're sorry

and you drop it over the fence

hand over head, like a kid mailing a letter

and you turn the gloves inside out,

drop them and run home before dark.

There's a dead baby in your yard

the newsboy said when he knocked on the door.,

It was over by the fence.

It was dressed in white lace

a christening gown

layers of white on white,

the baby had been washed,

the clothes had been pressed

it had all been prepared,

a small bonnet crocheted

a pearl ribbon woven through.

It was wrapped in a cover

a hand-knitted blanket,

the edges folded back,

the kind a grandmother would weave

the perfect baby, the kind a grandmother

would dream of

the son she'd never had,

the one she could spoil,

the one she deserved.

There's a dead baby in your yard

the newsboy said when he knocked on the door.

It was over by the fence where the Granddaddy

leaned against it, a post to divide his property

from yours.  Don’t know nothing 'bout no fence,

the Granddaddy said.  So now she's knocked up

and squalling out back,

serves her right for running around

serves her right for backtalking me.

The neighbor next door

was the one who was right

who heard late that night

the cat and the bird.

Take me to the fence,

the baby had begged them,

and when the newsboy arrived

he saw an alley cat out back

tugging at  some meat.  He heard

a single black bird

a cry in the wind. 

He rushed to tell all of them

what all of them already knew.

There's a dead baby in our yard

the newsboy says,

and something knocks at our door.

The Denver Quarterly, Summer 1993

Letter to Muriel Rukeyser at the End of the Twentieth Century

Your poems shock

the way waterlilies burning in a museum

shock the moneyed.  With fragrant treason you begged even the rich,

to understand, As you spoke to each generation as that generation,

your dark hair curled in the thirties

by a passion electric for justice. 

You named what we were taught to despise in the stone insanity

of the first century of world wars.  You said clitoris, and you said

penis, and with the reverence of the condemned you said asshole,

peeling off the mask of Orpheus, speaking to the yet unborn,

admitting to the torn life, begging: please no more mythologies.

You made contact like a pilot to a radio tower, the shaking wheels

of your single engine extending to touch down.

And when the young were going and going to war to war,

you slurred your words on the Senate floor

with thousands of others, jailed, one-half your limbs

stroked out in the fire of your brain, those slurring leaves of water lilies,

stepping stones to the cloud of the world.

As for us, yes, the young still go to war,

and wars continue at the speed of darkness,

not the world wars you expected, but the others,

Wars of despisals in our countries, in our cities, in other countries and cities.

Promises and solidarity collapsed, and in the confusion

justice circles this sweating planet, looking for somewhere to land.

The newspaper still arrive with their even more careless stories:

Union Carbide, high 46, low 45 3/8,f close: 45 ½, sales 482,800

JUDGE THOMAS:  I have never asked to be nominated. . .

Mr. Chairman, I am a victim of this process

PROFESSOR HILL:  I would have been more comfortable to remain silent. . .

I took no initiative to inform anyone. . . I could not keep silent.

A voice flew out of the river,

smoke of the poems we still try to write.

We too are more or less insane,

and even now through time

we witness the buried life.

At the end of this millennium

we are still writing our poems,

born as we were

in the first century

of the aftermath of world wars.

What Zero Looks Like

He says, What’s the biggest number? 

What’s out there, after atmosphere and space?

We are driving home from preschool. 

There is no biggest number, I say. 

There is always one more. 

He is quiet then, strapped in his car seat,

packing his cheek with one grape

after the other.

I open and close like the sliding doors of my mini-van,

watching him in the rearview mirror of my life.

 How much to say? 

How much not to say?

He says, After the oxygen we breathe

there is space that goes on and on and on. 

It’s called zero.  I stop myself from saying

that it’s not zero, it’s infinity. 

His feet kick against the back of the driver’s seat. 

Zero is when there is nothing, I say, adding

Would you like a cheese cracker?

He says, No thanks.  I’ll have zero cheese crackers. 

Then, to make a point he adds,

And no one knows what zero looks like. 

I am propelled again, a bell, a wooden clapper,

then silence along with the traffic. 

I pull up to the front of the house,

and go around to Nico’s side of the van. 

The capsule pops open he emerges

by his own propulsion, standing on the edge,

about to take one big step onto the curb. 

He holds out a trashy cluster of stems

without one fruit left on it. 

That’s what zero looks like,” he says,

and he drops it into my hand. 

First Place, Lyrical Poetry, Columbine Poets of Colorado, 2015

Re-stitching The Sky

I.

Vees of geese are sewing Denver back into its morning,

            where telescopic, multifaceted periscopes

            take in the entire dance & climb.

To the west, snow- peaked triangles; downtown,

             rectangles of finance & domes of government;

            under the interstate, warehouses of industry &

             puffs of cottonwood along the river.

The city’s trains with their lines of fat tankers & flats

            coo into the sunrise.

Semi trucks’ engines turned over earlier in the dark,

            when busy moms woke early for coffee,

            just to be still & alone.

From my back deck I watch the geese

            stitching with their black needles,

            I know they are only a speck of the dance

            & this moment is all of it.

II.

Even DNA dances--microscopic, subatomic, or less—

            beyond what I can imagine the body to be.

Our molecules jump their charged moments & surge,

            not with purpose or place, but to move.

My heart pumps quarts every minute through

            lengths of blood vessels that, stretched out,

            could criss-cross the Pacific Ocean twice.

Fifty-two bones in my feet, flat as a deck of cards,

            lucky to have ligaments & tendons, to bend & twist,

            to allow both a curtsy & a kick.

III.

A dozen women spaced apart in a studio with a wooden floor &

            walls of mirrors, where, for one hour,

            we will be a universe of movement.

First we buzz, wondering what the music will be this time—

            strings for a Bollywood hip shaking,

            Indian windpipes cooing,

            blues from a pained throat, or

            jazz hands spread in surprise, a

             hip hop fist pumping,

            a stomping jig, or a Charleston swing?

It starts inside a moment, but then a step forward & back,

            a repetition & reversal, as our faces become our real faces

            --no chit chat, none of that;     

            bones find their right places & skin begins to cleanse itself.

We attend the beat as the voices of the universe

            announce themselves, an unexpected horn

            blares in the heating & cooling of prayer.

When we did that, we were wild geese re-stitching the sky.

IV.

Life is not a dance exactly; what I am trying to say is that

            both are an outside movement from

            an inside moment that will not stay put.

When I say the geese dance, it is a metaphor for their search

            for food, the driven constant work of their sleek bodies.

When a family of waddlers blocks the park road—

            some taking their own sweet time to cross over,

            some waiting,

            others daring forward then changing their minds,

            I stop my car for them in my capsule of amazement.

I want to wrap my arms around one of the big ones

            & carry it onto the dance floor, switch off all the lights

            --no others, just me & the music & the goose.

Teach me, I say, flipping a switch on the sound system,

            hoping it’s something the goose likes.

V.

In the front of the studio the goose faces away for a moment, listening

            & when she turns back to me & opens her beak,

            she cries out the slow deep voice of gospel:

            I don’t know how my mother walked her trouble down. 

            I don’t know how my father stood his ground. . .

            I don’t know why the angels woke me up this morning soon

            I don’t know why blood runs thru my veins. . .*

She stands so still there, a bird with the blues,

            maybe thinking of her parents fallen in a field

            somewhere over Nebraska,

            or her stolen egg,

            a lost fledgling,

            & I stand with her until her relentless eye closes

            & she takes a step backward. 

I take a step backward.

*From “I Remember, I Believe,” by Bernice Johnson Reagon

Jackie published 250 copies of her poem book, Re-stitching the Sky, signed and numbered, handset, designed, letterpress printing with sewn binding done by Tom Parson (http://www.letterpressdepot.com). This book is not for sale, but may be used for educational purposes.

Turkey Buzzard Press
https://www.coloradopoetscenter.org/eWords/issue25/turkeyBuzzard.html

The Left Margin

I love the margins,

the left margin

that anticipates comment,

leaves room for

corrections, doodles,

the right margin

that keeps me from

going too far,

returns me to the edges

that tidy up

this jar of beans

Second Place, Free Verse, Columbine Poets of Colorado, 2016

Just Ice

Published in Texas Journal on Women and the Law

A measure of justice
40 pounds weighed on the public scale
the child's eyes
look down at his heart for mother.
It's Charleston.  1815.
A cup of cool mercy
on the bare backs
dry throats
eyes.

I wonder how, when.
I enter the courthouse from the hot sun,
the mercy of marble.
The line through the
metal detector
where we leave our knives with the guards
and take with us inside
all the forms of fear.

Each new day
a witness raises her hand
metal weights are adjusted
and a line solid and true
plumbs through the floor to the courtroom below,
and the one below that
and that to
the center of the earth;  while we
sit here and scoop with spoons
the mighty mass of the law.

We listen for:  a clear deep tone
look for:  a gesture
of something true, oh
bring me something true.
Line up the cookie jars
at the dining room table
the headless doll
in the mahogany armchair
the recently discovered bottles of vodka,
spinning on the table
with all the spent shells,
your napkins slit into slivers of silk.

Tell me now
what is the exact distance
between this flesh and that?
Measure it precisely, Justice,
in fingers, please,
in car lengths,
paces,
a hundred yards of football fields,
the field of all our possibilities
dissolving like ice
on the hot Carolina auction block
just ice
a trickle of spray paint on the elevator wall.

My toes spread wide
and I push all my bones
into the solid ice
where I now stand.
We must find the words,
get it over with,
make them up
say anything,
before it all melts
the pool of rights and wrongs we fight for today.

The drone of the docket
quiet curses
summer odor of
too many bodies in
too small a space
people with so much nothing
those with too much heart
those without enough.

Every case picks, slices, carves 
what we believe and what we
do not, in the
eyes
dry throat
summer odor of bodies
all the forms of fear.

Give us what is clean and true.
Scoop  marrow from our bones
Let our feet grow plump and pink,
Let them step lightly now
not to be sacrificed

to the cotton gin

the thresher.

The Drama of the Long Distance Runners

Published in Thinking Women:  Introduction to Women’s Studies, Kendall-Hunt, 1995.
--Dedicated to workers in the battered women's movement

I watch you in the court
House coffee shop.  Sitting next to
The angry young woman.  The one with
A newborn tied to her chest.  Fear
And despair criss-cross her back.  You

Listen to her insults.  She storms away.  You
Chase after her touch her
Cold shoulder, her tears on the brink.  You
Hand her a card your
Home number on it.  Her
Link to hope on
Some other day
Some other day.  Some

Other day she calls you
Her lawyer and sets a date and later
You rant about her she
Didn’t show up she
Didn’t even call.  At night you

Sip your bourbon and seven you
Empty your pockets you
Search for change you
Search for change you
Have to know:

Is she safe?  Is she still
Alive?  On your way home you

Check the back seat, look over your
Shoulder form your card to our
Door.  At midnight you
Search for keys you
Rattle the kitchen lock one more time before you
Climb the stairs weary
To bed.

I watch you
Her therapist prepare your
Testimony your
Expert psychological testimony  you
Review the research you
Draft the report with your
Clinical observations you
Substantiate your opinions
Bear witness to corroborate her
Reality with your colder, calmer
Objectivity.  You try to balance her
Accounts, reconcile your perceptions with
Those of your science and those of the law.

Sometimes you stare at the wall and you
Cry.  You sit there cradling her fate
So carefully in your learned, aging hands.

I swallow
The Sunday news with my coffee.
Yet another women killed by her
Husbandwhoshothimselftoo.  But
This one,

This one might have been mine,
This one,

Had I not been book up
And had to say no,

This one,

Had she had the money on Thursday
Instead of on Monday,

This one.  I enter the funeral
Home to see her dead body
Dressed like a bride in a box

This familiar stranger I
Talked to over the phone
Once.

This one

Whose Monday appointment Ia
Can now scratch from my book.  You
Sign the book at the funeral for this one
And open this book to write a poem for

This one.

Glenn Miller Was Missing

Published in War, Literature and the Arts, 1997 and in Thomas J. Cooley Journal of Clinical and Practical Law, 2001.   It won a Clincal Legal Education Association poetry award.

Glenn Miller was missing.  Somewhere over the English Channel,
his plane went down in December 1944.  You'd been drafted,
even with a wife and two daughters to support and
day work in a defense plant and night work in the clubs,
your teeth clamped onto the reed of  a saxophone,  chin tucked in,
neck thrown back under the black and silver clarinet.
Even in your tuxedo, you were slated for war.   
If Glenn Miller could die, you could die.
I don't know what it looked like,  you two too scared to be
separated.  They say your bags were packed for months.
You had to be ready to go.  Even the birth of a third child
couldn't stop it now.

By Springtime in Berlin Hitler was dead, or so it was reported. 
The war camps were being emptied of some, and filled with others. 
The boys were coming home, but no one was sure
whether to celebrate or not.  No one knew if you might still have to go
or not.  The war with Japan continued. Scientists were speeding their experiments. 
Khaki uniforms crisscrossing the globe.  Drop the bomb.
Alternative plans on the political front. Pressure from the Allies. 
Hurry before they do it first!  Americans were sick of war.  
In August, there were Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and I was born
forty days later.  In the hospital my mother counted all
my  fingers,  all my toes.  A baby whose father never had to go. 

It's as though it was set like a bomb fifty years ago,
and now it goes off  when the phone rings and it's my mother
calling  to hear my voice and she asks me if I know
that she is leaving by air transport.  She says,
I'm leaving for the war, and her 85 year old voice begins to tremble.
Will you take care of my children? she begs me,  warning,
it's a big job.   She is making these last requests of me,
This woman forever in fear of what the neighbors would say
this woman whose  sins I am sick to death of listing
and won't.  I think

how brave she is, this warrior, packed for the end, ready to give her all
for her country.  So I lie to her, and I tell her
of course I will take care of the children, they are such good girls.  I wish her luck 
and thank her for the sacrifice she is making  for us all. 
I pray you'll be home by Christmas, I say over the phone,
 and I mean it.  Her voice sounds so sad. I hope so, she whispers.
I imagine her head is down, phone at her ear, talking into her breasts,
loose now in a loose gown.  And then it is quiet.
I am lost in this when she starts to laugh.
I've been sitting here with the other girls, she tells me. 
Jane had a date last night.  I just don't know why Daddy
hasn't come to pick me up.  She begins
talking about you,

You over there on her dresser in the white tuxedo
with the black bow tie, your wavy hair so light,
your  green eyes young in smoky shades of sepia,
and folded in the other photo next to you
As you two were in the mahogany bed,
is this delicate young dark-eyed woman,
a farm girl pretending sophistication, a studio portrait,
something taken in the thirties, hinged there forever
looking out, not at us, not at each other, you have become
not even you, but Youth, so sweet
So strange to hear my mother now asking for you,
when the last time I saw you, your neck muscles
were finally surrendering to the pillow.
Anita wrapped your dentures in Kleenex.
I tried to tie my silk scarf around your head
to keep your slack mouth shut, but the weight was too much
or the scarf was too narrow, or my will to force the act was too weak,
and we dragged home to tell our mother. 
We lied to her that your death had been painless. 
Now we conspire again to protect her
and I wonder if that's what you did
when she says she saw you just the other day and
you acted like you didn't even know her.  I would never
cheat on Jimmy, she says to me now, I love him so much,
but now I don't know if he loves me.  Why doesn't he
come and get me?  I love him so very much, she repeats, more and more desperate. 
So I tell her you are nearby and she is safe right where
you want her to be, and she agrees that it's all for the best.
She calls me by her sister's name, lifts her voice, pauses and asks me,
and how are the children? 

One thing I can't explain is how I feel when people say
it must be so hard to see your mother's mind fail,
when I feel like finally, finally,
all of her places and years come pouring out to me.
And I think it is me she tells these things to
only because I am here, and because
when Glenn Miller was missing and
she was afraid of war and so were you, 
you comforted her all night long.
So that now, nine months and fifty years later
when I walk through the door
with my trench coat folded over my arm,
she looks long into my green eyes,
and she thinks I am you.

Red on Her Fingers

Published in Tumblewords:  Writers Reading the West, University of Nevada Press, 1995

". . . it came from everywhere.  Which is to say it was
always there, and that it came from nowhere."
-- "Mood Indigo," Blues If You Want, William Matthews

Every morning it was waiting on the other side of her
eyelids;  lingering near the coffee pot until fed; 
it didn't eat much, though it ate often;  at first

it was only a sound in her body, racehorses crossing
her chest;  her breath and her heartbeat panting at the gates;
her bowels rumbling with the winner;  it became

other people's opinions, something gray that soiled
the town, selecting victims by the size of their hearts;  it
was a challenge in black and white;  knight to queen's fifth,

the envy of a baritone for a soprano who sings the bass line; 
but she caught the rare whiff of hatred in the piano
bench, a small mirror hanging in a tin frame;  she found it

red on her fingers from forcing open the hard nut of
compassion;  and it was worn like calluses for a gui-
tarist, green bruises inside the gymnast's tired thighs;

but truly it was also confession, an old shame trickling
down her leg;  she felt bellows pumping, the open wings
of  a heron flapping;  and thick freckled arms stoking

the fire in the living room of its childhood, where at Christmas
the black engine and four cars circled and circled back into
grievances, admissions, and closed fists pounding;

rosaries began to murmur about it, and quickly
everyone would take sides.          Once
in the back of a drawer she found an old

photograph of it:  1949;  she stands
barefoot, alone on a sidewalk, little shoulders
strapped in a sundress;  her hair long

and light;  one hand on her hip; 
that hip cocked;  the other hand shades
her eyes;  she's squinting at it, daring it to shoot.

Autumn in Five Parts

Selected Poem from What Remains (Turkey Buzzard Press, 2016) published in Colorado Women News July 1993 and Montelibre, 1993.

In early autumn, sunny gusts signal a shift,

            the kind of mystery neighborhood crows warn about.

In the garden, the last zucchini lies down with the cucumber,

            under an enormous frond. 

In its corner, the pumpkin drinks and fattens, drinks and fattens,

            While hailstones pock its holes of memory.

Seeds of armyworms under curled leaves of baby kale

            carry more futures than remains. 

2.

Across the street, my neighbor cranks a long piece of metal

            under the hood of his pickup. 

For years, he’s never spoken or waved or made eye contact,

            except last January first, when he was shoveling snow.

At the moment he stood to catch his breath, I shouted

            Happy New Year and he lifted his hand, kept shoveling.   

This time, sunlight catches a long filament flying

            from the eave of his house.  Now is time for serious work.

3.

Drops of water light on silvery cobwebs stretched across mushrooms

             to blades of grass to mushrooms to blades of grass. 

A slow bee probes the yellow mum in the terracotta planter

            just the size and shape of a rabbit. The wind rises. 

My mind rakes the ground under the tall ash while the leaves

            continue to fall one by one, as we do.

 A single crow slides in and out of view. 

4.

How like spiders we are, we aging ladies refusing to go gently,

            grabbing at the forearms of our bossy daughters,

We smile at the neighbors and stomp our feet at doctors,

We are planning our escapes—one will take a bus

            to Dallas and see what happens.                        

One will find the now grown child lost so many years ago,

            and one of us thinks she will stay put. 

5.

Last week, the tangle of planet, sun, and the evenness of days

            Aligned as they should.  Now they begin to unravel. 

Yesterday when I opened the garage to grab the rake,

            a six-sided spider web filled the doorway .

When I stepped in, the web snapped.  I felt the force of it

            against my forehead. 

I heard the sound of the trap.

---

A POEM FROM THE BOOK:

What Remains

$15.00

In 2016 Jacqueline’s first book of poems, What Remains, was published by Turkey Buzzard Press.

"I believe in the power of poetry lies in its play of time and memory with music and meaning. . . Who are we? we ask, and scraps of experience rain down."

(Photo credit: Peter Bryson, Nooknose.com)

(Price includes domestic shipping and taxes, if applicable.)

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Quincentenary Poem: Civic Center Park, 1992

Selected Poems from What Remains (Turkey Buzzard Press, 2016) published in Colorado Women News July 1993 and Montelibre, 1993.

One by one they circle the park,
Eagles facing east from
Courthouse columns
Capitol dome
Museum fortress
The glass rectangular offices of industry.

These are the closed edges of architecture,
This law, this art,
This swallowed literature,
The politics that burn
This island of seeds laid out like tiles On which we march. 

It's another turn of another century,
stage-blood covers the globe,
Stains the pool of buildings
And the books of bones

That do not burn

---

A POEM FROM THE BOOK WHAT REMAINS.

Poetry Is An Act of Love

Selected Poem from What Remains (Turkey Buzzard Press, 2016).

To love a country is to know its poets.

Is there the soul of a human being in there?

Pure uncertainty yearns in a minor key.

Going out to get a poem is like hunting.

Is there the soul of a human being in there?

Miles said: Don’t play what you know, play what you hear.

Going out to get a poem is like hunting.

It is what the mind takes hold of.

Don’t play what you know, play what you hear.

It is what the mind takes hold of.

To love a country is to know its poets.

As if poetry were an act of love.

---

A POEM FROM THE BOOK WHAT REMAINS.