Poetry |

“Collective Effervescence”

Collective Effervescence 

 

It wasn’t the lifeless laptop screen packed with

opaque square frames or off-tinted faces —

the skittish connections —  Zooming in for poetry

class — sometimes just a nose or an eyeball

appearing … then vaporizing — all of us so

weary. It wasn’t the boxes of salted chocolate

pinon caramels my son turned up with,

night after night, the sugar buffering my hips,

or the bottles of Bandol rosé I had introduced

him to; it wasn’t his enthusiastic arrival to our patio

most evenings for wine and paprika chicken.

Fearing he might be one of the asymptomatic

he kept his distance so not to kill us. It wasn’t

my hungered for, in-person trips to the store,

armed in purple mask decorated with toothy grin,

green rubber gloves, the collective trauma and

strangeness causing all grocery carts to merge

haphazardly in the snack aisle like iron shavings

to magnets, even as we were trying our best

to maneuver away from each other. It wasn’t the

kindness of curbside pick-up, the quarts of guacamole,

Oaxacan salsas and soft tortillas carefully

placed in the trunk of my car. It wasn’t

even the bristly-coated New Mexico

shepherd dog, his vocabulary increasing

with the abundance of attention. What it was

was the trees, the forest dense with the thick

puzzly-growth of ponderosa bark, that butterscotch

scent; the limber pines in the courtyard, their

branches leaning in to shade; the nectarine full

of her blushing progeny. What it was was the

black widows, nesting individually yet collectively

in the garden shed so that when I opened the door

their plump abdomens shone like black holes

filling with daylight. What it was is what it is,

the Steller’s jays bouncing from mound to mound

of the horse manure we piled around trees in the yard,

white feather markings alongside their beaks like face paint,

their navy crests bounding with effervescence

at discovering seed after seed, worm after worm,

in those decomposing worlds of moist dung.

Contributor
Elizabeth Jacobson

Elizabeth Jacobson was the fifth Poet Laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets 2020 Laureate Fellow.  Her most recent book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, was awarded the New Measure Poetry Prize (Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. Her other books include Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books, 2012), two chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press, Are the Children Make Believe? (2017) and A Brown Stone (2015), and Everything Feels Recent When You’re Far AwayPoetry and Art from Santa Fe Youth During the Pandemic (2021), which she co-edited. Her work has been supported by grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, New Mexico Arts, and the Academy of American Poets. Elizabeth is the Reviews Editor for the online literary journal Terrain.org.

Posted in Poetry

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