I tried to trespass beyond that invisible barrier that no one is allowed to cross.
–Tony Shafrazi, vandal of Guernica
I was dead an entire spring.
I lost clumps of hair
and my nails peeled and flaked
until I almost had none.
My bones were lifted into a sack
upon my legs. Even the muscle decayed
from the lack of wild oranges and tea.
I could only fill the cup to the rim so many times
before the spill. This is the myth of my life.
In Spain a cricket was loose in our kitchen,
and it’s chirp was like my name
or like the words yes and yes.
But what could a dead woman know of yes?
That summer, one cricket became two
two became four. It was then I remembered
the trill and grind of my name.
Like a vandal with a can of red spray paint
I may scrawl the words kill all lies
across my Guernica. Who will be the bull,
the horse? Who the severed head and arm?
Under the bald lamp like an eye,
I will expose old scars and breastfeed
a shadow of myself.
Didi Jackson’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Ploughshares, Green Mountain Review, The Common, Café Review, Passages North, and Sierra Nevada Review, among other publications. Her manuscript Almost Animal was a finalist for the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize offered by Persea Books and a semifinalist for the 2015 Orison Poetry Prize. Her chapbook Slag and Fortune was published by Floating Wolf Quarterly in 2013. She divides her time between Florida and Vermont, teaching humanities at the University of Central Florida and poetry and the visual arts at the University of Vermont.
