Dream of a Separate Language
Jacqueline Winter Thomas
in the dark of the century
you walk ahead of me
animals we named
books we buried
still we did not know
how to speak of the dead
*
where the river-bed turned to rot: the shape of wars
where I laid you down with lichen: sentence about your dying
*
there were no fields
you said, no expanses,
only weight of skies
as thunder-strike
once hoar frost,
false meters, now fields
fresh-appear yellow—
where fog hangs
and stanza breaks
*
we speak of this in poetry / we dream in diasporas
we walk in these lines
as, in the earth, cold ones walk
and cannot find the burial grounds
*
somewhere some will speak these names
someday some will think these words
Jacqueline Winter Thomas received her BA in Literature from Ramapo College. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at UNC Wilmington where she teaches creative writing, and an MA candidate in English at Middlebury College, the Bread Loaf School. Her poems have been published (and are forthcoming) in Barrelhouse, Trillium, and Burningword, and her papers have appeared in Metamorphosis. She is interested in the convergence of poststructural poetics and semiotics. She writes at heteroglossia.tumblr.com.
