RECENTLY DIVORCED

We danced, the barfly trying to coax
rhythm from a corpse.
When the music stopped,
she lowered me into a booth,
gently patted me on the back as if tamping dirt
strewn with sharp rocks
over cut roots.




FINDING YOUR BIRTH-MOM IN THE STATE PEN

For MLS


Learning your foster parents beat you
when you cracked a single shell
returning from the henhouse,
she listens, barely breathing,
staring in pure wonder
out of her baggy jumpsuit.
It makes her look like an astronaut,
astonished by her orbits
and discoveries,
shrunken by the news
of speckled eggs as lovely
and menacing as the moon.



LITTLE MOONLIT HOUSE

For Kim


Slowly pulsing, we
are two slugs on the gutter
fused with moist intent,
the love that dreams us, not
the other way around,
though every now and then
it doesn't hurt to aim
our antennae at the stars.


Mark Jackley is the author of two chapbooks with a third, “Cracks and Slats,” forthcoming from Amsterdam Press, and a full-length collection, “There Will be Silence While You Wait,” on the way from Plain View Press.