Sarah McCartt-Jackson

 

McCartt-Jackson hails from the Bluegrass State and is a graduate student in the MFA program in poetry at Southern Illinois University of Carbondale where she also teaches creative writing.  In 2009, she was the runner-up for the Academy of American Poets Prize at SIUC.  She currently serves as the poetry editor for Sunsets & Silencers online literary magazine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Interlude – (for Domestication)

 

These moments happen.  Suddenly –

a stitch drops off

  the needle, bares cold the metal.

Those clacking sounds. Cease.

 

And when you look through

   yourself in the mirror, the silver

sheet is only an ugly face.  A thin lip. 

       A pleat creased,

 

   starched into another pant leg.

 

There is no lace

    in the hinge of your knee.

  But there is yes

flat as linoleum, yes graver

          than a diamond,

 

Yes in a cattail grating

on the sleeve of a reed.

 

 

~originally appeared in Monolith

 

 

 

 

        Abyssal Plain

 

After he shot a hole in the paddleboat on Reservoir 3,

I started hearing about Nate’s crystal meth use,

and when he slammed me drunk against the wall

   with his oak-rough hands the last time, there was nothing left

to do but drive, straight out

of that western sunset that burned like a worried bruise.

 

I was tired of returning to work on the ranch each day,

our struggles stitched on my lip.

 

The silence of others trembled like shadows at the serrated edges

   of merlot leaves.

       Everywhere on the ranch, silence. 

Sloshing in the four-wheeler gas tanks. 

Stretching from the thistle-filled vineyard rows. 

Burrowing in the quills of owls. 

       Skittering through beady coyote eyes. 

 

Until I buried it in the Atlantic in the ear of a conch,

exhaling that pink smooth secret.  Half mollusk, half water.

 

 

 

 

Double Wedding Ring

 

The water surges and raises the silt,

which lines the valley bellies with yellow slurry. 

 

As mud eddies inside the hearth

and coagulates the fireplace ashes,

 

Ora remembers her own wedding

like sweeping a broom through bloodroot,

 

their marriage the splink

of rust-warm rain on a tin roof,

 

his touch like goldenrod pollen

in the small space between her legs.

 

Her yes was the bell of jonquil cones,

his voice a hubcap rattling with gravel.