JENNIFER MACKENZIE
Jennifer MacKenzie teaches English and writes (prose articles) for
Forward Magazine in Damascus, Syria. She was a Truman Capote
Fellow at the University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, and she has
published poems in various journals including Fence, Verse,
Quarterly West and Greatcoat.
Pharoah Glimmer
1
The unmarried sisters are washing
the cracked stone courtyard below
Jingle of women, what is it
but your white own hidden
in a city you walk through foreign
without singing. Your armpits
fern-rank with lust. Your hair, smoke
Everywhere our breath bequeathed to curtains
in the quiet toss of crisis spooned
along night's back like honey, cold
Hadn't you better lay back
down full of the solitude
you stung with imagining
the brides of Spartan soldiers
shorn to look like conscripts waiting
in thatched huts for dusk to fall
floating and drubbed like branches
in the dim foam of temporal bewilderment
with soft hands and rough clothes
2
But you wanted to go into something
you called "a glimmer"
But it was really more like shame
But is it so different writing in pencil
It is, because the sound
You straddle the puffy blue mat
with the white line drawings of a woman
on her back. Like a Pharaoh swimming
There are the parts of your body
that are something wrong
Days you can call back into being
These are called "the future"
3
I hang my doubt an opal
lamp among fruits. Reality
flows into all the spaces, how
strangers test our pity. Someone thinks
I am for sale and touches my arm
more insistently. How much
the limbs perceive, cooled and viva
After kissing I sit feral, waiting
for my played skin to become audible
A crouched white traitor. Ace
5
He is a sort of wall I could bask on
Art thou. Yeah, well. Fetch me then
Lurking from all attempts not to think about war
end in my body white strong strange culprit
in the mirror far iron tang of well water covering
my deep heart at sea, a child lying on a carpet
I am shorn in extremis, shivering to die
I love the small field, the smell under my arms
His backache, his three of shrapnel, small
pink mole-nose of each nipple unsquashing
when I take off my bra a joy similar to panic
I felt watching him listen to music, and why
these young voices should shelter
wealthy efforts at mucho damage
Untidy with breath, gaudy with pleasure
for a little stitched while, or steadying to take
a picture of a shattered doorframe. Splinters
in silhouette. Always a train
Moving west. Etc. hair messy
abject face. Ratscape. Breadspace
when rage relinquishes my chest
and fulcrum-calm of dear. Waking
I strip off my warm shirt like a country
settling doves. He doesn't know what
I mean. Well then I'm the short gray
dog trotting alongside language
7
An icy noon. A man enters
the restaurant, unzips his leather jacket
Can or can't go from each
bed with this cup of asking
to catch the rain inside his chest sprawled
little country crawling forward on its ribs
That's what we like you to think, we like it
when you thank us. I want to be every cage
disbelieving, blinkless. I inside the narrows
of red brick, brick dust there, of men's chests
Breaths pounded open, sun-tongs through hayloft air
Workshirts in cigarette ads, full-page, glossy
My unbound hair destroying everything
and deeply. The list of errands helps somewhat
to give me edges, but only briefly
Then an absence gashed with trees
You must take care of yourself
You must rest and work in plain gray pencil
above the unenchantable sea faithfully
consuming all entrances to itself
A face tipped up at the behest of rain. Quietly so
it is the least real voices that most own meBack to Front.
