Danse Macabre XXIX

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Kathryn Jacobs

 A Little Scary

 

 

Like tea-leaf powder, stirred: a dustiness.
A not-quite nothing texture on the tongue.
Ignorable as rediscovered spice –
aroma, after-flavor: just a whiff.

Or like those sky-specks, grackles. So far up
that you can blot them out and recreate
at will, by staring. No, not even that:

like dots behind your headache: churning blips
in hazy copper-glaze. To catch at them
discretely, as a dozen separate specks,
you have to pay attention: focus in.

But then that’s all you see. Those memories
you never had the first time – picked out bits
of broken splinters tweezered from your skull –

Change everything. 
 

 
Kathryn Jacobs is a poet and medievalist who took her doctorate at Harvard before joining the faculty at Texas A & M - Commerce. Her volume of poetry, Advice Column, appeared in 2008, and she has over a hundred poems published in a wide variety of excellent journals such as Measure, New Formalist, Acumen, Washington Literary Review, Poetry Midwest, Slant, Decanto, Mezzo Cammin, The Barefoot Muse, and 14 by 14. She is also the author of a scholarly book on medieval marriage customs and sixteen articles. She has two daughters living and a son dead in 2005, at 18. Danse Macabre welcomes Dr. Jacobs to our pages.