All You Want

I'm working. All day today since Semiotics was cancelled due to my professor's being ill. So I'm working on my semiotics paper. Suture in the literary analysis of Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour." Now, I know this story very well from writing two papers on it in Intro to Literary Theory (is that what it was called?) two years ago. I loved it, thought it was masterful. Others didn't. (wink, wink, Brian.) So here I am working with it again only on a completely different level. Not in terms of its symbols but in terms of the subject intering into the Symbolic order. Abstractness, I know. Don't hate me when it turns out to be a revolutionary study. A revolutionary study of suture in literary analysis in five days. I'm sighing right now if you didn't already know that from the hint of warmth that just landed on your neck.

Then there's my study of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens. A creative piece, thank goodness. Once I get a handle on both of them, it should be fun. Like my creative Emily Dickinson essay was last year. But, once again, I'm juggling two of these freaking papers at once. Plus, my poetry portfolio (my own poetry) is due on the same day as this Williams-Stevens thing. Plus, I'm giving a reading at Henry's this Sunday of my own poetry for the first time ever. Plus, Jedsen's birthday is next Tuesday, and how am I going to see him? Plus, Beth is having her baby on Monday. Plus, our treasured book gets auctioned at Christie's on Monday. Plus, I tend to get anxiety from time to time about things like these.

Ties

I don't regret. But I don't forget.
Those old homes, sandstone,
sink in their bedrock underbellies
under my grown years.

Wherever I am, wherever the sills
collect my dust, I curl and claim
for the moment, but, so.

That rectangle of a childhood home,
stranger, rots. The dirt decades old
in the dandelion shag was dragged in
by someone else. My brother and I
never left our picture under the loose
carpet by the door; we figured it would decay
before another name could blame the floor.
I don't see myself in the blue walls
of a bedroom now labeled a closet, the blue
of a girl in love with the sky. I don't
need its stiff windows. Even the light
can't breathe.

And then there, that nook in a box
with too many beetles, even though
it was mine (no mice called Mom)
I don't need it. I never wrote my name
on the closet door or baked
sugar cookie into the oven bottom.
It's not mine.

Here, my philodendron in the corner, my
Poe on the shelf, my flats near the bed,
I know. When I go, whenever I go, this place
won't hold my name. I won't need it.
I am not tied to shag or picture
windows or certain hills. I would go
to Austria and make it mine. Or a farm
in Kansas. Or a square
in Melbourne. Only windows,
only windows.

--Kari Jackson, 2008

Definition

An eyeless trout searching for a reef.
The fray of an unraveling hem.
A distant moon, orbitless.
A cat without her tongue.
An unsigned cheque to humanity.
A loose shoelace on a morning run.
A capless marker left to dry in the box.
A First Edition missing its spine.
The shot of pain before the toothache.
A glassless picture frame on your wall.
One move short of checkmate.
The interruption to your favorite song.
Eight fingers with a gun.
A calendar forever on April.
A surname with no first.

--Kari Jackson, 2007