E·ratio

Issue 19

 

 

 

Dream of a Separate Language

 

Jacqueline Winter Thomas

 

 

 

 

in the dark of the century

         you walk ahead of me

 

animals we named

         books we buried

 

still we did not know

         how to speak of the dead

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

where the river-bed turned to rot:      the shape of wars

 

where I laid you down with lichen:     sentence about your dying

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

there were no fields

you said, no expanses,

only weight of skies

as thunder-strike

 

                  once hoar frost,

 

false meters, now fields

fresh-appear                   yellow—

         where fog hangs

                  and stanza breaks

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

we speak of this in poetry / we dream in diasporas

 

we walk in these lines

         as, in the earth, cold ones walk

 

and cannot find the burial grounds

 

 

 

 

*

 

 

somewhere some will speak these names

someday some will think these words

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jacqueline Winter Thomas received her BA in Literature from Ramapo College.  She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at UNC Wilmington where she teaches creative writing, and an MA candidate in English at Middlebury College, the Bread Loaf School.  Her poems have been published (and are forthcoming) in Barrelhouse, Trillium, and Burningword, and her papers have appeared in Metamorphosis.  She is interested in the convergence of poststructural poetics and semiotics.  She writes at heteroglossia.tumblr.com

 

 


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