TWO POEMS / JILLIAN BLACKWELL
Casting shadows to make a mold of me
Dry lick of a hillside the nape of the neck grass tufts
a crow crabs around the interior of my head like the thoughts clattering in the tree branches. They are black as raisins from far away, black as dismay, a month when I begin to sleep in new beds.
There is nothing to do but count things.
The wind off through the dull headstones some fallen over like lolling heads of old men asleep on trains
through the triangle windows between my teeth and away. Crumpled hands in my pockets.
It will never be spring, I want to whisper to the snowbells, I shouldn’t have believed you.
It is so sad to lose one’s trust in something so small and beautiful.
The birds alight and aloft the smudge left on the matchbox in the wake of the strike the inverse of stars against the sky
There is no window pane in me. This headstone no longer has any words, the surface smoothed out like the end of a frown
I can’t even begin to forget whoever is lying down there.
Feeling a winter winter
The sunnier sun the where
the old couple, the man tripped on the curb
the woman tripped over him
the man with the guitar played
across the street the woman with
the Kleenex the man with the bag of
ice the sunshine the expensive shops
the 4 dollar coffee. The woman who
knew what to do. The trail the woods
the ten mile hike. The winter like
a cold steam breath into a snowy city lane
the cars asleep under the white
the pant leg stained blood
the pant leg pulled up
the troubadour singing about a troubadour
the woman baking a valentine’s cake
the old caramel corn
the papers and hand shakes and
beer cans, girls doing backbends
the rolled up rice the windy drive
as night blends softly with noontime.
JILLIAN BLACKWELL / DENVER, CO
When Jillian Blackwell was a small child, she sat in her Great Uncle Charlie’s lap and filed his nails. He had big, broad hands and flat, yellowed fingernails. She was in her grandmother’s house in the country in Texas with a dusty, limestone road that curls through a stand of live oaks. She and her brothers and cousins hunted for fossils–ancient crustaceans from when the area had been an ocean. That place is no longer an ocean, the giant oak tree by the barn is just a skeleton, her Great Uncle Charlie is no longer alive, and her grandmother is no longer alive.