Jessica Q. Stark is a PhD Candidate in the English department at Duke University. Her poetry and/or illustrations have appeared in Lute & Drum, Tethered by Letters, and Potluck. Her first poetry collection, Savage Pageant, is forthcoming from Birds LLC. She writes a poetry zine for the Internet called INNANET.


Also by Jessica Q. Stark: Two Poems Psychogenic Illness I & II

Poets Resist
Edited by Krista Cox
July 15, 2018

Jessica Q. Stark

Everyday Phenomena

Today I awoke to walls and Circumstance: tidy entries for small hands clasping wire. Yesterday, you took ten whole steps. My face left gasping — I couldn’t grab palms fast enough before you fell. There are mirrors of our selves caught on two sides of an imaginary set of lines. Taking steps on chain-linked lilies, crushed petal underfoot. One of our ghosts is waiting, the other is counting thread. Aluminum blankets are an invention for the idea of human temperature without warmth — save kindness, kindle, visions of a Pink Panther comforter left out to dry — tumbling cat. Science never provided a good antidote for love, for thought, or a means to end causes of human suffering. Find me a way underground out of hallway and uniforms. Find us the root and mess of all of these tidy encasements. Would you point me in the direction of my afterbirth, splayed out like all of my important organs placed outside, no woolen sheet or ribcage for comfort? Don’t look for the legal term for that kind of discrepancy: all of these hearts beating out of body, just walking around.


Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.