When the beauty mark scalded,
when the starter house spewed
gutter-flowers, when the virtuous
sister, daughter 4254, rode a celestial
dolphin home, but home was a savage
country, and when every monsoon bore
echoes of the silver girl I was, and the love
library became just a mansion’s cameo,
when intimations of the quartet did nothing
more than mimic the scorched pastures
and the tomb, I kept moving and saw,
that what persists is a second-shift art,
a game with the sun, our only game under
our only sun—life, elemental—and I lapped it up.
*February 2019 is comprised of book titles collaged from The Writer’s Chronicle Vol. 51:4, 122.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 24, Issue 6.
Jackie K. White is the author of three previous chapbooks and the co-author, with Simone Muench, of Hex & Howl, Black Lawrence Press, 2021. A former professor of English at Lewis University, her poems, translations, and collaborative poems have appeared in such journals as Bayou, Third Coast, American Poetry Review, and Pleiades.
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