Poems
By: Jessica Harkins
On leaving your daughter to a monster
When my mother does not let me say what I am afraid of,
and gives me the silent treatment for crying,
I am on my own with the fear
she says is all in my head, will only hurt me if I do something wrong,
if I invite it.
The morning my stepfather catches us wading in long, shallow puddles
on the concrete floor of one of the turkey barns
my brother presses his hands to his bottom, palms out,
as I do, uncontrollably, as we are spanked with kindling.
Livestock huddle in the shaded corners of far pastures.
A few birds, dogs, wander between an empty house and drive.
~
A god once stood from the river when his daughter called.
He rose and stood waist deep in the waters:
there in the middle of the poem, line fifteen,
words flowed past; he could lift his hands and the words
ran back down over them.
He threw some to his daughter, splashing her.
~
When Psyche’s parents leave her on the mountaintop
to a monster she cannot see or name
moss-covered rocks gleam in the late sunlight,
grasshoppers chirr, wind rushes, banks, and wheels.
Her limbs tighten as she tests the limits of her sight.
A dust devil rises from the slope.
In the house of the missing god
On the backs of milk cartons, missing children
smile into space. Murderers
and molesters kill time
that stretches across highways and a faraway town
rippling at the horizon.
Whenever I look up, the valley lies open,
a gutted carcass drying in the sun.
Everything here inhabits its remains:
circles of turkey vultures widen and drift.
It happens when I am watering chickens,
or stacking wood: muscles on my back grow tense,
a draft of air brushes my neck.
No one is there, not behind me,
not in the shadow of the barn.
Insects grow louder until their ticking
clatters like an irritated heart in the grass.
Electrified bursts of Jackrabbits.
The madness of constellations
pours down unfiltered.
Sweeping the aisle of straw,
I think I am preparing for a god’s return, staving off
his displeasure.
Outside the barn door a harbinger appears
twenty feet in the air, invisible to the naked eye,
a mottling of light that falls through the clouds.
It shifts and ruptures the air
like the sense of a coming storm.
I don’t know that the god for whom I am preparing
might be my father. That he might be what
tore away the sky.
I don’t know that each day I am clearing an altar
where I am the offering.
When I muck stalls, I think
I am making a ritual against loneliness and terror.
I think if I have things in readiness,
the animals will flow into the stalls like love
Nightmares
In your dream invisible hosts touch your belly
and sides. Afterwards a force encloses your hands
and presses them around the handles of stall doors
as you shut horses in. You pray to escape a heaviness
that bores into your chest and drags you from your bed
to trap – you are sure – your lucid mind outside of
your sleeping body. Mornings you can’t move an hour
or more while a wolf as tall as a man roams the house.
What you fear must be avoided silently: in the horses’ stalls,
fluff-up the bedding just so; dispense vitamins; half bury
the grain can in a bin of oats. It can all hold. The latches
will keep. Despite how the house shifts around at night
and distances crawl out of the floor. What you fear will
come to take you. You’ll see it gathering in the upper shelf
of your open closet. Inside your dream you are awake
and start to pray as it pulls you from yourself, repeating
words that language might hold you in return.
Psychic potentials
i.
Against the trunk of an old oak: a teenage girl with eyeliner around
the inner rims of her eyes, mascara thick on her lashes.
She is not smoking. The sky is drying out
like a shirt, but that is too literal.
No, the sky is still damp
and yet it is lightweight enough for the slight wind to lift
and buffet its edges. Maybe it is like a blouse the girl
does not wear. She wears long silver earrings she bought at the county fair.
Her fingernails are stubby and torn. It does not matter
if she is pretty or smoking. Her lungs hurt
and she is cold despite her jacket.
She does not have a ride, or she does, or it won’t happen for another few years.
It’s like she’s watching for the car she knows isn’t coming.
ii.
On the roadside hunting for tins cans, the odd dime,
a quarter. Gravel slides steeply to a ditch
chockful of bunchgrass and debris. Beyond it, a path
follows a rundown fence through sun-bleached wildrye,
barbed wire loose except where a broken post
hangs against the strands. You turn then
and find someone else crouching on the roadside.
What you see is her disappearance, a confusion of light.
And then a blackbird twittering leaps from the brush.
iii.
In oak woods after school, as a girlfriend and I gather wildflowers,
the oaks speak through great branches rolling out of their sides, thinner limbs articulating a fine curve,
leaves uttered through a change of seasons.
We wander inside their language, inside the spaces their trunks carve, and kneel
to another bloom curling through wintered grass.
It happens when I look from the corner of my eye: a tree
explodes, not explodes entirely, but next to the trunk, at the floor of its roots, a movement
unaccounted for, a contraction. Breakage to a resumed flow.
I wouldn’t jump were I to see a rabbit, a deer.
Then the form would come through – but when it doesn’t, when it only nudges the light –
iv.
Whenever I look at the oaks, I see a girl has just vanished.
She could be my neighbor, Rhonda,
whose feathered hair falls into her face when she helps me color;
or Casey’s older sister, Anora, who, Casey tells me,
made out with an eighth-grade boy in their barn.
She could be me in a few years if I ever get pretty enough
to be (picked up, picked out) made into that girl
by someone pulling over.
Jessica Harkins’s first book of poems, The Paled Guest, was published by Kelsay Books, and her poems, translations, and articles of literary criticism have appeared, or are forthcoming, in journals such as Copper Nickel, Birdcoat Quarterly, SLANT, Interim, Versodove, Exchanges Literary Journal, Matter, The Chaucer Review, Cimarron Review, SALT Magazine, The Adirondack Review, The Comstock Review, Redactions, ARS Interpres, Agenda, and Stand (U.K.). Jessica is a native of rural Oregon, though she lived in Italy for several years before pursuing an MFA in poetry and a PhD in English from Washington University in St. Louis. She currently teaches creative writing and medieval literature at a small liberal arts college in central Minnesota, where she lives with her husband and two sons.