Jessica Goodfellow
Two POEMS
Uncertain Cento
I am of those whose knowledge will always be
the door closed against the half-lit hall.
What darkness snips at our hearts.
The horizontal rush of it, for a moment,
will simply be the cessation of asking, a thousand
wands of jonquils not yet bloomed.
I've always loved the way the invisible
of a chaotic stew of particles
speaks to the defeated.
Knowing what I know,
how I would like to just unravel
each long white hour.
Numbers and names I don't recognize,
thing to be stacked against floods,
bison drawings, cavemen, mothers, mud—
I have no knowledge for you;
so I invent the Etch-a-Sketch and draw
what message the snowstorm was straining to utter.
Sources: Jeffrey Harrison, Marianne Boruch, Charles Wright, Robert Hass, Stefi Weisburd, Andrea Hollander, Maura Stanton, Kate Gleason, Jim Moore, Sarah Hannah, Nicole Cooley, Allison Titus, Jenny Browne, Cynthia Arrieu-King & Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis, William Olsen, Betsy Wheeler, Michael Dumanis, Joseph Brodsky
Mind/Body Problem Cento
The mind is a tiny island you’ve washed up on,
gone wild with error.
Be courageous when the mind deceives you, be
made of my womb's long-playing record. Listen to
bone shuddering as though it were bird. Rainy
thesis regarding the origin of love, I
know this: blue's an illusion. The things that shelter us are colorless and
between me and the chewing dark.
What instruments we have agree
that every set has something in common with the ‘empty set.’
Sources: Dean Young, Jennifer Chang, Zbigniew Herbert (trans. by John & Bogdana Carpenter), Lesley Jenike, Colin Cheney, Troy Jollimore, Dionisio D. Martínez, Lynne Knight, W. H. Auden, Lars Gustafsson (trans. by Christopher Middleton)
Jessica Goodfellow’s books are Whiteout (University of Alaska, 2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala (2015) and The Insomniac’s Weather Report (2014). Her poems have appeared in Verse Daily, Motionpoems, and Best American Poetry 2018. In 2016 she was a writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve. Jessica lives in Japan.