Jessica Lindsley- Three Poems

The River

the river
     gathered us at the shores,
     gathered us to sit along the banks,
to watch
     gathered at the show, we
     gathered in hordes along the banks
and remembered as
     all our belongings were swept away
and stared
     at our reflections, dumb and cold
     when they are gone

wooden  

wooden people holding their breathe in silence
waiting for the moment the right time to speak
but the time never comes, they remain in small
apartments and shabby homes together yet not
waiting, unbreathing shuffling slowly in dull
circles around the issues the biting words over-
heard in the shower the sobbing in the dark in
the silence the silence the silence
the way they don’t fit together anymore, don’t
touch: he wears his body jealously, she wears
her own body the same; inertia keeps them from
reaching for each other, from wearing both bodies
at once in that second that is love: they never learn
to stop walking in those rutted wooden floors the tell-
ing of lies piles up like filthy socks but mostly it’s
the silence the silence the silence
they never stop pouring quiet, too broken to learn
wooden people never learn, never learn to speak

(First Published August 2002, Blackwood Press dub)



Nocturne In Blue

when did the sun fall
when did night rise up
a well of ink spilling
like un-oxygenated blood
over the coast, the beach
the docks, the water
closing me off in my little boat

nothing more than a ripple
a whisper upon the waters
the air heavy, hanging
like linen, like canvas
like death, suffocating me
among the pockmarks,
around me the doleful
 

nocturne swells


Jessica Lindsley grew up in North Dakota before the oil boom. Her work has been published in the Smoking Poet, Blackwood Press, Thirteen Myna Birds and other publications and other publicatons.