Featured Poet: Jackie K. White

Jackie K. White has published poetry and translations in such journals as ACM,
Blackwater Review, Folio, Quarter after Eight, So to Speak, Spoon River, and 
Third Coast. She has been a fellow at Ragdale, the Virginia Center for the Arts,
and the Mary Anderson. She is an editor for the literary annual, RHINO and an
associate professor at Lewis University. Her PhD in Creative Writing is from the 
University of Illinois at Chicago where she also completed concentrations
Latino/Latin American and Women’s Studies.  Two of Jackie's chapbooks will be
published in 2007, "Bestiary Charming" by Anabiosis Press and "Petal Tearing and
Variations" by Finishing Line Press.

Blues for a Hard Fall

1

Give me a miner’s hat
I’m going down
Give me a miner’s hat
I’m going down

What does it matter that
the sun is brass, leaves flecked with fowl—
dusk blears canary to a gray-white swell.

Under my song’s a braying hound
together in the well
at the bottom of this shaft
one of us will drown.

2

Night heaves and my marrow darkens;
vagus nerve-throbs send the neck blood
pulsing toward a shoe to drop, or sharpen
each last leaf, each paged prayer turns to thud.

Give me a farmer’s hoe
I’m hacking through
Give me a reaper’s scythe
I’m hacking through

Fields dried up cut down are paved,
one steps into falls gets up, is shod on loss;
each day’s colder gray blanks no clean slate,
anger nettles me with prickly frost.

3

Give me a sailor’s slicker
I’m tossed at sea
Give me a whaler’s spear
I’m crossed at sea

what does it matter that
the sky is red – it’s swarmed with geese,
and dawn breaks to shale I have to stack.

Under the moan of a beached baleen
alone in this expanse
fog-blurred field-wide well-deep
we split, hit ground and sink.

first published in Near South (Volume 5: Winter, 2005)

Under the Laws of Motion

it is like this:

the cusp of evening, a man
shows up at the door and
instinct draws the hand
forward, and you open, I
opened it. The door that
opens closes. A world

happens inside a room
when the body that entered
meets the hand that opened,
the hand moves along
the body, the body of
space between them closes.

It is the nature of bodies to
keep moving, doors open
and close as the earth goes
on spinning and you can’t
keep the moon out of
poems. Inside the room,

a lamp glows. You begin
asking, what is the moon for?
You know you can
turn off the lamp. Inside
every house doors lead
to other rooms; inside one

a man and a woman keep
an old story between them:
somebody leaving. Outside,
equal opposite motions: leaf
rustle, foot scuff, another
hand to the threshold, a body

first published in 9th Annual Juried Reading Chapbook (The Poetry Center of Chicago, 2003)

Fernando, To Fernando

Tell me the heteronym of your worst self
and I’ll let you decipher my handwritten diary.
Today, one said, I like engines much less,
but we know that’s a lie – it’s always a you
or I unliked, and it’s all over the diary
scraps gathered from the floor of a messy
but respectable tavern, homely, adjacent
to the train station. You never dared to
get on the train long scrutinized, schedules
studied, as if you were genuine
about going someday somewhere to be a new.
How unremarkable, the failure to change
the face you look out of, the fixed
others pinned in word-photos, the wheel-
longing your stare chugs along, along with
everything, says the diary, “tremulous” and “banal” –
the inert exhaustion of wanting to want
nowhere to go. You go back to your rented
room, window to the tracks and write
nothing – blank confetti later to litter
the hardwood under strangers’ feet and
suitcases on end. The head of one self
spins with the disquiet of a departing train
the other pretends to have boarded.

From Eurynome in Exile 

The First Wandering: July, ‘98                                    

“we have to make a negotiation with the places we leave behind, the places we return to”

                                                (Andre Aciman, False Papers)

(6-12)

The next mornings I crept out of
my sister’s cabin holding the rest of them
in sleep on a Medicine Bow mountain,

took a path to a cluttered clearing, a broken trunk,
and notebook on knees, pursued my old routine,
beginning one of many stories. 

In the hour’s stillness I could hear each
creaking tree that years from now will fall,
and the wind grew into hissing or shirring 

wheels across interstate 80 rose up to me
(no matter where, I hear
highways and night trains and the “what will you do) 

then something else moaned, nearer,
a voice in the branch that tomorrow
will fall beside me as I put down   

The second evening:
We piled fifteen in the Chevy suburban,
                                                drove to the summit
to watch the sun-set
               on the range beyond Elk Mountain.
                                             And back,
after the fire-side stories
outside the dark cabin,
 my sister says, you could be safe
with your words here,
               but my younger brother walks me
                                                   to the end of the road.

There he tells me the military
scrolling maneuver of his desert
war days eight years ago.
It’s called hearting the area--

How to capture an unknown place,
one by one the soldiers are
sent out, in opposite arcs from
an imagined center.

If they meet silence, the next two
spool out, one by one, and the first
set advances, and if no one is shot,
they close the heart at its end point. 

We stood together in the middle
of the gravel road, silent for minutes,
then he says, “since you’re the smart one,
tell me, what’s this line from--

‘this is the path thou hath yet not taken,’
says, “That’s all I kept thinking when
I stood there waiting, holding my ground
for another private or enemy coming--

“And I keep hearing it in places like this--
see that full moon? You think it’s pretty,
but we’re exposed.”  As we turn back
he insists, “there’s gotta be a poem in this.” 

(13-31)

Long after my return to prairie,
squeezed again into Midwest suburbia,
it comes back to me:  how to capture the land’s

                      

snow-peaks slope into hills lush falling
pines away into Nebraska flat tawny
Iowa valleys green Illinois cornfields and soy,

and despite the simplicity I want a year for,
his words and foreign words and the diverging
roads of family tell me
           there won’t be any cabin in the woods:

In this space of time
           the mind’s wide
as this country, & 

the questions spool out one by

one answers are
     animal-like, bird-skittish, head
raised at every noise—

& where do they come from, 

the lines that haunt us—
do they say,
move out
stand still
or, arc the way
home.       Is the sound
         wind      
wheels, or      
enemy

© 2007 Jackie White

Featured Poet: Mary Biddinger

Mary Biddinger spent half of her life in Chicago and environs before defecting to the Cuyahoga Valley, where she is currently an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Akron and NEOMFA: Northeast Ohio Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in a variety of journals including ACM, American Literary Review, Crazyhorse, Harpur Palate, The Iowa Review, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, and Salt Hill, and her first book, Prairie Fever, is forthcoming from Steel Toe Books (Spring 2007). She is an Associate Editor of the literary magazine RHINO. Her favorite tree is the Sugar Maple. She is currently at work on a second book of poetry.

THE TWINS

I see it: no more dusk

to your days. Months ago we

stood on a porch loaded with

empty terracotta pots.

Matchbooks, snowbound

floribunda, empty rice sacks.

It occurs to me that everything

is still there without us,

creaking with temperature

swings and rainstorms. Smoke

from the three women next door,

locked out and waiting.

There were landscapes

in acrylic. Chimes from clocks

we couldn’t find. Plum tomatoes

in quart baskets. I watched

them shiver into pools

on the countertop, as if you

had rolled them in your hands

for hours. Light was gold

and inching closer, taxis

banked cheek to cheek on

the highway below. Evenings

like this I wanted kept

on ice or tucked beneath

a layer of silk. I didn’t have silk, 

only wool and nylon. There was

nothing left of the night,

only train cars and breath.

They could dust me for prints

and find just fingertip salt and rust.

You were a halo of consonants

in the dull ebb of my pulse. 

I could have hung my jacket up.

You could have told me how

they found us and took us

to our opposite corners, separate

lawns, rooms where we both slept on

twin beds, star quilts, lost in the scent

of cotton batting and blackjack gum.

ROYAL BLUE

We were two strands of thread 

snagged on a wooden barn door.

You were odd granite shrapnel

in my safety goggles. One wet

sheep standing on the driveway.

A bad stomachache after apples

and capers. If I painted the wall

ecru, you walked into it bloody

handed. Those days were less

Flemish and more Portuguese,

at least in the beginning. What

Old Master would’ve measured

from my elbow to the toaster?

If oxen crowded the interstate

we were in no way responsible

or even aware. I was not your

wife, not even close. Alpacas

always left me shivering like

a tuberculosis stick, or elevator

skipping a floor. A cartoon man

naked in a barrel can never be

unrolled. I ironed handkerchiefs

for quick cash. I let them weld

me behind some mesh. It’s mean

the way we flush right out, like

milk, and then we begin all over.

Once, we both lived underwater.

MILFOIL & AFTERTHOUGHT

There were four rooms. There were eight. You were in corners and under
furniture, near my knees, reflections of your back in stainless steel.
Suspenders, Florsheims and avocado linen. There was limestone halfway
up, and I knew I’d crash into it if I could move fast. You thought it
was a cold place. The light bulbs?  It was all like helium to me at
that point. I said someone should be taking pictures, the way we were
sprawled on the hardwood or propped up on rattan sofas. One time in the
airport we were both small and spun together in a leather chair chained
to the ceiling. You touched my leg.  Nobody was taking pictures, but
that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, or that we weren’t in Frankenmuth
five years later, at connecting tables but kept separate. A shed behind
the school, or that storm sewer at the dunes, past the grasses, left of
concession, the sand that felt like clay, like slip, how blond you had
become, I hardly recognized.  If you were here in this room you’d
remind me of the guitar, the train platform, the silver Cutlass
containing me and continuing on past it all. You said we’d go back. I
was always a good runner.  You said: the smoothest skin ever.  We’d
seen the skyline from two dozen taxis, our own legs on the bridge, from
the grass, from the grass again, in the grass on my front lawn, lit by
the cheap plastic solar lamps, from deep past the buoys of Lake
Michigan and into the waterways connecting.  We knew where we had come
from, had that in common.  In college I looked out the laundry room
window and saw you between leaves, in a corduroy jacket.  We’re here,
you said. There were blue sheets I used instead of curtains.  Later I’d
be in a hundred rooms with tin ceilings and slim wine glasses, or
rectangular tables and cinderblocks and papers.  In the subway window
I’d look nothing but tired.  I would try everything from milk to cactus
in hope of turning you to milk and cactus and dark rafters and back
again, so when I closed my eyes it was heat and every other color we
described.  The nights kept us like ants under plastic.  I kept you in
places that were cool and uncovered.  You touched my face like it was
years ago and just starting. I was busy fending off letters and
drinking green tea and lying in a cool bath.  By noon, everything was
back where it had been. We’re here and we’re living, you said. 

FOXGLOVES AT 3 PM

Ballooned on the back porch

like a bullfrog in springtime.

All full of it. The whole world

going down on its neighbor

and then sliding up bus steps

fragrant with Dial, snapping

wintergreen gum. Sunglasses,

duffel bag, nobody knows

how damp your body is.

Rooms the buttercup gold

they use for schools, seen

on desks, hushed in cotton.

What’s not a hustle? No

need for silk when you’ve 

got grease. At the opening 

reception, nobody checked

the broom closet for nudes.

There were hours pressing 

faces under the paintings,

a glass of whole milk split

between us before stained

glass grottoes. Grandparents

dressed you in lederhosen

every autumn. I was lost

as a child and felt my way

into a neighboring borough.

Why were we the only two

left at the end of the song?

It sounded like shaking, coal

dust, bells, a sitar and tabla

set loose in the wet mines.

We used to meet at the back

table, like we were corporate.

You would help me with my

buttons. I walked that room

and stepped through the blinds

into midday traffic, our haze 

a secret. Each dress I snagged

on the same broken hinges.

RED SEA

An afternoon across from you

in copper light. Smuggling

a quart of milk on the city bus

to drink between potholes.

We stood at the edge of a lot

rumbling with maple leaves.

Lie down in it. Lay it down.

An hour later under sixty watt

bulbs, albacore in pepper oil.

Where did I go when your

arm slid across my shoulder?

Even my palms turned cold.

Even gabardine went sharp.

You told a story of cloves sewn

into canvas pillows. A wife

who loved blanched leeks.

A childhood of Appaloosas

that resisted training, or girls

in distant cities wearing silk.

I remembered a chandelier

I once dissected in the basement

without permission. Your face

startled in the stairway. Blood

rides water underground

like another body. Waiting on

a bar stool in Waukegan, knowing

you are in Ashtabula, no phone.

The sound of dancing drifts through.

© 2007 Mary Biddinger