(Mytho)Poetics
Jacqueline Winter Thomas
You said good-morning & your voice was wind-swept,
was sycamore.
I have no right to say a word, to speak your name.
I carry your language like a city inside me
I am breaking apart from the callous world without, am aware
that you will die & all our common people will die.
There will be no reason to say
your name, to ever tell how I felt.
*
At night I plait my hair, my braids.
I dream Desdemona crying, burials for the dead,
unreal cities.
I know you will walk there inside the city of language
& never turn back for fear I’ve disappeared.
I will wait for you. In this line. In this.
*
You wake to blackness. On which side of eternity?
This—
or the next?
Existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities
of darkness.
But I took your hand once on the dark path to river-run
& cried, eyes dusty because I could not believe in eternal
recurrence.
Of this you spoke, kissing tears or stars. I loved you
when I wasn’t yet allowed, I desired your skin & lips. I slept
in the thought of you before we spoke. I walked the road
to our home before it was ours.
*
You looked wrong in the new-light & I hated
the world with a strange ferocity for ruining the one thing
I begged to have spared.
I no longer desire, no longer know the weight
of stars & skin, they have ruined small things, half-worlds,
& I curse them
with a language I neither trust nor own.
I will not wait. You will
turn back.
Contributing editor Jacqueline Winter Thomas is an M.F.A. candidate in poetry at UNC Wilmington where she teaches courses in creative writing. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Barrelhouse, Tinderbox, E·ratio 19, Nude Bruce Review, Trillium, and Burningword, among others. She is interested in the convergence of poststructural poetics and semiotics. She writes at heteroglossia.tumblr.com.
