Jessie > Recent Status Updates

my brain...
it trying to save me
[from remembering]
someone who is not there after a while [so] after a while,
it erases [person]
before [person]
erases themselves.

perhaps had it not been for you // sweet ache // i wouldn't have known what it is to feel lonely // next to someone you love // I wouldn't have known alone as the most comforting
demon

those who have the least are often
offered up at a crossroad.

i think about my name
how it is the first gift i gift to a stranger

My father may have been filled with enough cracks in his face to cause an earthquake of laughter to ripple through our home.

I guess anything can be a gun if the darkness
surrounding it is hungry enough

grandpa
finally got sober
but he still smellin
like the sweat you
get from trynna
outrun some real heavy
shit

I don't know how many mothers walked grin the mouth of that summer childless

This skin we wear expires with the sun
We were born into curfew

We finally learned how / to undress a whole season / with just our tongues / & pull back the sheets / with its taste / still in our mouths
...

I don't want to be threatening / just feared/ enough to never have to / make a fist

We all have to make sacrifices
We all have to keep the dirt from underneath the fingernails of our mothers.

There is so much piano spilling all over our laps, that we can't help but to smile since we still black and know nothing can ransack sorrow like a piano.
...
Piano can coax even the most viscous of ghosts out of a body

That hot land is a part of me, as a fundamental to my shaping as a family member, and I would have remembered its precise features with an ache of homesickness even if I had never seen it again.

Inside the nest box, the baby birds are powerless, vulnerable to the fury of the pitched summer sun, of the house sparrow's beak. Bounded on all sides by their sheltering home, they are a meal the rat snake eats at its leisure.

Nights I cried for a long time after that. Days I went to work like always.

The miracle isn't happening in the sky at all. It's happening in the damp weeds of an ordinary backyard, among last year's moldering leaves and the fragrant soil turned up by moles.

They are looking at me as if I am the sun, as if they had been cold every day of their lives until now.

I want to live the way you did,
preparing for next year's famine with wine
and music

Absence is louder than any sound.

you are still here,
Looking through my eyes
At what you have left,
Calling on me to attend to it,
To all of it in your absence.

While nothing can appease the first raw grief at a loved one's death, in its aftermath, poetry may offer a unique kind of solace.