This Is Where I Keep You

I want to make love to you
in a crowded room with staring headlights
that look like wedding flowers

and tie you up with my hair
between the blinds’ shadows
that look like grey skeleton handprints.

I want to walk with you
up and down the balustrade of our balcony
that smells like blood from Russian bricks

and hold your hand inside my ribcage
where it makes my heart move
and smell like a water birth.

Why do we hurt each other
with dull words and sharpened nails
that taste like rubbing alcohol

and then sooth the wounds
with wet bodies and swollen mouths
that taste like yesterday?

Why do we fight about the seasons
before they have a chance to change
and sound like a funeral procession?

Why can’t we ever just watch green leaves
against the windows as they catch on fire
and sound like us breathing before sleep?

You take my face in your hands
after I’ve squeezed it dry and colorless
like the coarse bark of a fallen tree

because your skin is always moist
along my eyebrow, and pressing hard
like a rutted oyster keeping safe his pearl.

You think we look more beautiful
when wrapped in water and eyes
like the silk of a peacock’s dappled tail

because then there’s no place
for me to hide and wither
like the grains of a desert mirage.

When alone, I’ll drink the sand,
or will you fill my ribcage full?

—

This selection comes from Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars, available from Split Lip Press. Purchase your copy here!

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated as a Jewish refugee from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1993. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is in the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature Ph.D. program. Julia’s poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Southern Humanities Review, Green Mountains Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Guernica, and Nashville Review, among others journals. Her manuscript, The Bear Who Ate the Stars, won of Split Lip Magazine‘s Uppercut Chapbook Award, and can be purchased from Split Lip Press. Most recently, she won Burlington Book Festival Short Works Writing Contest and Spark: A Creative Anthology’s writing contest. Julia is also the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine. Find out more by visiting her website.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Mother Always Knows, So

I tell her, my jaw came apart, but first there was the cracking
like strikes and strikes of lightening                but there was no light
She asks if I saw blood                            No, I answer, having to recall
the naked gum line             where my teeth like even rows,
flowerless pots       cracked             and cracked again
She says, it means someone is going to die                  someone not close to you
blood would signify closeness, she adds                                   and I wonder
how to calculate proximity, the pace of death         its touch based on a lack
a reach we cannot hold                based on this dream
based on my mother         how death can come on fast
a lightening strike, so bright and far away            you have to wait to hear it
crack the air                         wait for it to pin the soul
wait for ground or its jawline              for someone’s
toothless grin to shine               and fall                           out of the bloodless sky

—

This selection comes from Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars, available from Split Lip Press. Purchase your copy here!

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated as a Jewish refugee from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1993. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is in the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature Ph.D. program. Julia’s poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Southern Humanities Review, Green Mountains Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Guernica, and Nashville Review, among others journals. Her manuscript, The Bear Who Ate the Stars, won of Split Lip Magazine‘s Uppercut Chapbook Award, and can be purchased from Split Lip Press. Most recently, she won Burlington Book Festival Short Works Writing Contest and Spark: A Creative Anthology’s writing contest. Julia is also the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine. Find out more by visiting her website.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Aubade to a Husband

In the church
                     of skin
from which there is
                     no cure
for light or hip-fire
                     night-fulls,
our bodies grow
                     limbs – ghost-like,
they rise and sink:
                     the weight
of a spoon
                     disappearing.

You’re up stirring
                     coffee:
lukewarm, untasted,
                     bone-heavy
white now, and perhaps
                     we’ve had
another fight,
                     another nothing
not to talk about.
                     You’re too
tired again, too empty
                     to move close
in daylight (how to
                     remember
the feel of flesh?)
                     and I trace
the thought
                    of leaving
in a mesh pattern
                   of sun echoes
dancing
                   across your face:
glints fallen
                   from my wedding band –
sun bunnies,
                   I called them
as a child, unlearned then
                   in the art
of skin-prayer.

You haven’t
                   shaved in weeks,
but still the light
                  turns both your cheeks
to stained-glass.

—

This selection comes from Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars, available from Split Lip Press. Purchase your copy here!

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated as a Jewish refugee from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1993. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is in the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature Ph.D. program. Julia’s poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Southern Humanities Review, Green Mountains Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Guernica, and Nashville Review, among others journals. Her manuscript, The Bear Who Ate the Stars, won of Split Lip Magazine‘s Uppercut Chapbook Award, and can be purchased from Split Lip Press. Most recently, she won Burlington Book Festival Short Works Writing Contest and Spark: A Creative Anthology’s writing contest. Julia is also the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine. Find out more by visiting her website.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Holding Another Woman’s Child

I’ve imagined him
dying in my arms:
head suspended

like the last white blossom
on a weeping cherry.
His hair would come away

slowly as petals,
his yielding body
would stiffen to dry twigs

that snap and splinter,
trying to leave roots
in my hollow abdomen,

in a red watered soil,
and I would almost hear
his plum-sized heart

shrivel down to its silent seed.
Alone now, with her son’s pulse,
his head in my hands

feels like a warm bowl of milk
filled to the brim.
My fingers cup its edges

to keep in the flood
of white light he can’t see
through red-lidded eyes

where lashes haven’t yet
sprouted, where life
stirs sleeping

under ripening skin.

 

—

This selection comes from Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars, available from Split Lip Press. Purchase your copy here!

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated as a Jewish refugee from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1993. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is in the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature Ph.D. program. Julia’s poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Southern Humanities Review, Green Mountains Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Guernica, and Nashville Review, among others journals. Her manuscript, The Bear Who Ate the Stars, won of Split Lip Magazine‘s Uppercut Chapbook Award, and can be purchased from Split Lip Press. Most recently, she won Burlington Book Festival Short Works Writing Contest and Spark: A Creative Anthology’s writing contest. Julia is also the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine. Find out more by visiting her website.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The Secret to Remembering

You hold it in music, but you’re growing
deaf in your left ear and I imagine lilacs
bursting your eardrum, their purple plume
smell, their pulse, falling away from flower
to captured water, your ear holding the ebb
of perpetual ocean like a seashell.
                                                                    But in me,
it won’t stay static, and swims
from belly to throat, reaches
behind the eyes where like a child,
lost or drowning, it floats, hoping
for rescue, for a reminder, something
more tangible, more held than night,
with its citrus tinge of lemon pepper
and sea salt, more audible than its violent,
split-by-violet, seething sky.
                                                         Recall that rain.
Where did you hide it? Its sonic
boom on the skylight, the way it tried
to touch us, the way you couldn’t tell
one drop apart from another, and the way
my voice turned to weather on your hands.

—

This selection comes from Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach’s chapbook The Bear Who Ate the Stars, available from Split Lip Press. Purchase your copy here!

Julia Kolchinsky Dasbach emigrated as a Jewish refugee from Dnepropetrovsk, Ukraine in 1993. She holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Oregon and is in the University of Pennsylvania’s Comparative Literature Ph.D. program. Julia’s poetry has appeared in or is forthcoming from Southern Humanities Review, Green Mountains Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Guernica, and Nashville Review, among others journals. Her manuscript, The Bear Who Ate the Stars, won of Split Lip Magazine‘s Uppercut Chapbook Award, and can be purchased from Split Lip Press. Most recently, she won Burlington Book Festival Short Works Writing Contest and Spark: A Creative Anthology’s writing contest. Julia is also the Editor-in-Chief of Construction Magazine. Find out more by visiting her website.

Jennifer Jackson Berry is the author of the chapbooks When I Was a Girl (Sundress Publications) and Nothing But Candy (Liquid Paper Press). Recent poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Booth, The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Moon City Review, Stirring, and Whiskey Island, among others. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.