Jessica Smith
—
25 April 2014 / Birmingham
a hundred miles per hour
Pelham to University
don't die
hazards blinking tick tick tick don't stop
don't spin out on the way there,
the mother to save the child
meet us at the hospital
swallowed pink bitter
candy in desk drawer
death by painkiller
relaxed and slow
dreamlike pink
running through the lobbies
passed
desperate
mosaics
colored to comfort
children
26 April 2009 / Buffalo
we began by going west toward the steel bridges
we try to establish a difference between rushes and cattails
to see the same heron
a birdless day
just the broken nests
of last year's clutches you the naturalist find
a strange podded weed
a solitary redwing blackbird stuck to bare winter branches
in the rushes
as in a dream we twist open with
a key
together depart the familiar and wander in "what is inside of it?"
"more of itself"
to
a wet field of bright yellow flowers off-path
painted over the whole forest floor magic
you held your heart all the time
as if to save it
Jessica Smith is the author of numerous chapbooks including Trauma Mouth(Dusie 2015) and The Lover is Absent (above/ ground press, 2017) and three full-length books of poetry, Organic Furniture Cellar (Outside Voices 2006), Life-List (Chax Press 2015) and How to Know the Flowers (Veliz Books 2019). She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and teaches at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
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