All tapered, watchful, streamlined
back from whiskers to racing ears to
claws. Even in this stream I saw one,
dowsing its snout through multiple
elements, more than I could see.
First solid, then liquid, then
grief: Whitman’s lesson on
how the body’s messy journey carries others.
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy
jags—the petals carpeting the water
keep my brother to heart, though I
loved him for his self-
making towards some destiny downstream.
Now we know that Whitman’s brother, Eddy,
often shared Walt’s bed: sweet, slow, did the
poet remember him in eddies? I go
quiet looking at our photos, my body
regressing forward next to his constant
sleekness at twenty-seven. I imagine going
to bro-hug him now and slipping
underneath or through, memory
vortex and still
waters.
If I could
X-acto a bird shape into this creek
you’d see Aaron for a second, before life
zeroed out the surface for the next otter.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 27, Issue 1.
Josh Jacobs works at MIT and lives outside of Boston. He won the 2023 Common Ground Review Poetry Prize, selected by Oliver de la Paz, and was a participant in the 2024 Yetzirah Jewish Poetry Conference. His work has also appeared in Pangyrus, Stone Circle Review, and Verklempt. He holds a BA from Amherst and a PhD from Rutgers.
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