ASPASIOLOGY
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact

Jess Stickler in Response to Donna de la Perrière

and then make the body and the fox a machine

Calamity
​

The story goes:
 
Your horses
 
Your horses
 
Your horses
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
Give me  those horses that bite our  hands and spook  and kill our
mothers and write this whole book of dead horses, dead mothers,
dead uncles, dead to our mothers, dead to our horses--
 
 
The brilliant sphere in your chest forms, splits apart, swarms
 
 
 
 
 
 
If you’re reading this you know about the horse
 
 
 
 
 
 
If you’re reading this you sent flowers to the funeral
 
 
One sound then  another  ambushed us.   Picture  a room,  empty
except for  its light  and dust  particles suspended  in the light, no
one could leave the room, there would be no tomb and no casket,
we spread her ashes wherever  we  thought  the  marsh  wouldn’t
swallow us up.   Picture the night holding  the scream of a barred
owl until it breaks  open  and the  scream  is a  hole in  the  sky—a
horse   gallops  through  to  trample   your  mother  into   the  field. 
Across the night, its other sounds rush into a vacuum.  I felt in the
dark for a switch to  start everything  right again,  her  body  being
burned into the ashes we would spread near the marsh.  I ask you
again  what  huckleberries  are,  try  to  taste  something  sweet.  I
try—I do try  to force the sky  into a fox’s  body and then make  the
body and  the fox a machine  that throws out light.   All of us need
light  and all of us  need dark.   The negatives and positives collide
and  then  there’s  just  nothing  to  scream  at,  nothing  to make a
machine.    Now    the   field   full   of   chrysanthemums   and   the
exhausted horse.­­­

 
 
 
 
 
Back in the house,  we  make a  prayer  circle.   We give  praise  to
what still remains.  How still and how beautiful.  How dark it all is
where we go when no one is looking.
 

​

Jess Stickler grew up in rural Michigan, where she still lives. She works as an administrator at Mid Michigan Community College. Her work has appeared in Spittoon, as part of the PEN poetry series, and elsewhere.

Follow on Twitter or email Gertrude And:


Email

aspasiology@gmail.com
  • Home
  • About
  • Contact