Jackie K. White
Somewhere a woman writes wolf,
kicks off slipper for shoe, suede solid
from glass, she and the wolf form a truce.
The spell is a surrogate language to mother,
unsmother my asking how to excise
the nursery tales’ prick and orphaning
and patch what frays from the now.
Suddenly I don’t know anything for certain:
did she who loved sun and green, love autumn’s
russet gone dank, gold brittled to a yellow must?
Was there a trail she meant me to follow?
The fields between us are fallow and forest pale,
and the sea down there, held in a bay,
holds a vessel that strains against rocking.
Call it grief, set it adrift, will it buoy?
Around your stiff torso, wrap your own arms,
and sway while the storm brews and waves crest
from where she’s dead. When the wind drowns
out the wolf’s wail and the girl’s, what motion?
No. Nothing moves. The trees, empty. I stand
still in bare feet.
Jackie K. White earned her PhD in Creative Writing (poetry) from the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC) and was a Professor of English, now Professor Emerita, at Lewis University. She has served as an editor for the literary journal RHINO and is currently a consultant for Jet Fuel Review. The author of three chapbooks—Bestiary Charming, 2006 Anabiosis Press Award; Petal Tearing & Variations, Finishing Line (2008); and Come Clearing, Dancing Girl Press, 2012—her poems and translations have appeared in ACM, Bayou, Fifth Wednesday, Folio, Quarter after Eight, Spoon River, Third Coast, and Tupelo Quarterly, among others. A collaborative chapbook of poems written with Simone Muench, Hex & Howl, was published in 2021, and their full-length collection, The Under Hum, was released in June, 2024, both with Black Lawrence Press.