Author Archive
something pulls collagen from the bones
frays the heart with too many rubbings
each shallow exhale wearies the body
expelling all we’ve got in the same old words
given only a finite number of times
to unmask declare affirm who we are
every word spoken is one word closer to our
last tread across our own and another’s senses
closer to one last shudder as we lay
“etherized upon a table”
sensing death’s hover we spew words
believing it natural to become old
when all along the fountain of youth
lives in the chary choices of our syllabic exhales
the good listening on the inhales
but what of silliness and the funny
business of the misspoken to break
dire days of planning
of taking oneself so
so serious?
Mary Strong Jackson
November 18, 2017
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A child chooses a space where pine tree branches hang low, where no grass grows giving the bare ground beneath the tree a circular religious feel, perfect for the child to be unnoticed. Sometimes she settles inside a metal culvert under a road, a dry tunnel for her to sit where no one blames, no one intrudes. She places rocks in the shape of a heart, and other found objects, a rubber molded doll with a green Robin Hood hat and brown boots, a stack of sticks for a pretend fire. In these places, she wonders over thoughts and feelings. She raises her voice in song, and words formed from interpretations of her world all become a sort of prayer, sometimes solemn, sometimes joyous.
With no indulgences, blessings, or lessons needed, she consecrates the earth beneath a tree and in a metal culvert.
The child becomes a woman. She decides what is holy, and what she will make holy. If God, Jesus Christ, gods, or the blessed trinity exist, they exist in her, even if, or, because, she is a woman or neither, because it should not and does not matter.
She discovered the sacred between breathy ideas, curling leaves, deadly goodbyes,
times held in limbo, and the thoughts before the brush of paint meets the canvas whether it remains or is wiped off, before words mark a page whether they are erased or not.
With no indulgences, blessings, or lessons needed, she consecrates intentions and all else that keeps her alive.
The child grows old under the tree and in the culvert. She lies on her back now feeling the packed ground under her tree and when she rolls to her other side, she senses cool metal. Her toenails have grown into talons, yellowed and thick with lines of strata marking years. Her nails contain chalk, soot, earth, algae, scars from a once-smashed toe, they are rough-edged catching on blankets reminding her of loving someone those summers when she hoed the garden barefoot with callouses so thick she stood a quarter inch taller. Loving all those someone’s in a lifetime.
With no indulgences, blessings, or lessons needed, she consecrates layered strata.
Her children don’t see the sacred strata of her nails. They only hope the nurse can cut through the yellowed bird-like nails on her feet, and dispose of them, not seeing what’s to be revered, what sacred lines she’s layered into mighty talons to claw her way towards death.
The nurse cuts away at the claws. Soon more ways will be found to intrude, though, she understands, it is done with good intentions. She rolls over and returns to her place under the tree, and in the culvert; the spaces she made holy. She will die and meet her maker or meet nothing and either/or is okay with her. She will die knowing she found sacredness the only way possible for her, not through the trust of others, but through her own self, soul, being, and let it be known, it is good, holy, revered, and right.
P.S.
This is what she meant to express:
This is judging. She’ll work on that or maybe she won’t.
The above was written because the woman has been thinking about the word sacred. But she realized part of what wanted to be expressed is how pissed off she is at men who attain power and dominate women (and children and other men), men who are priests, movie executives, politicians, mass shooters, bosses, the guy next door, a husband, a father. She does not want or need any of you. Go away! She loves men (and women) who do not need to do these things. Men with insight and heart and confidence and kindness. She knows if women rise to power they will abuse it too, maybe in different ways, but still the chances are high. You asshole men know who you are and if you don’t, you’re even bigger assholes with no awareness of self or others, have you found nothing excluding money and power to venerate, revere, love? anything but yourselves? Stop it, just give up your power and money. What? You can’t? You are afraid of everything without it! Yes, you are. Crawl into your own vulnerable openings and eat shit.
Mary Strong Jackson
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“We push the same earth ’round and ‘round trying to make a life,” said my neighbor who painted his gravel driveway like a highway – black base, white-striped edges, and yellow-center marks.
Were you crazy like everyone said, or did you want to trick a teenage boy into mistaking the driveway for the highway and catch him and his buddies who called your brilliant daughter cyclops because of her one drooping eye?
From my kitchen window, another neighbor in another city, flits across my yard making me believe in middle-aged fairies, so waiflike I wonder how she survives her mild-mannered-blank-as-a-slate man by day, alcoholic ogre by night who waits until neighbors sleep, then screams, “I AM JIM MORRISON” over and over. He does this 3 to 4 times a week. I tried turning lights on, stepping onto my porch, after weeks of this I yelled under a full moon, “SHUT UP”, then YOU ARE NOT JIM MORRISON, then OKAY, YOU ARE JIM MORRISON, NOW GO TO BED. Nothing stopped him until he was ready to retire in early morning. Police might come, talk to him, he’d go into the house, police leave, he’d return to his post and begin again.
The fairy picked lilacs from my yard to give me, and said with a sweetness only fairies must have, “He’s okay. He just drinks a little.”
She wished me well and worried over my move away. She tried to pay for my garage sale rugs held tight in her skinny arms. Her black fingernails dark against weaved beiges.
All us odd ducks walking around aware and unaware that our senses continue to touch as we push this ball of earth ‘round and round’ shoulder to shoulder even if we pretend we don’t see, smell, touch the one next to us or those across the tracks. Like Sisyphus the big ball keeps rolling back over us even as our anomalies slip up the rotation each time one stops to paint gravel, yell from a deep echoed well, believe in rock-n-roll reincarnations, or any other out-of-aligned step.
What does a collection of odd ducks, flitting fairies, and all those Jim Morrison’s of the night do but cause a stutter in the earth’s roll, a break in time. This lapse from what some consider forward progress of the earth’s roll, this pause, offers others a time to touch, mend, apply the gauze, offer water, use our feelers, until on any given day, we might hear, “If I was any happier, I’d be dead!” Words of my next odd duck neighbor.
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Elli drops by for tea in a tank top
bragging of dropping Thor to one knee
flexing her muscles as a threat
Crone stares into Elli’s rheumy eyes,
“Even gods are aging losers.
One might think you’d weary of winning
when each conquest requires owning
one’s own whys. It’s a sort
of sorrow of its own, winning is.”
Elli sneers
veins pop from her neck
down the back of her wiry hands
red lipstick bleeds into her wrinkled lip
Crone wraps her own strong arms
around Elli, “Lets embrace time
until we call the hour of our final bout.”
Mary Strong Jackson
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my body has become a compatriot of mine
I am slim from love of it and cinnamon rolls
body and mind ache in ways known only to us
ache for past places and dead people
but are soothed by tiny leaves caught in the gutter
and a dog’s breath on our pant leg
my compatriot’s full on coupling
with my mind makes me marvel
at our conjoined responses
until we aren’t sure if the mind
stubs itself on sharp corners
and the body ponders ideas
or if it matters
as memory enters body and mind
both remember the joy of falling
the sorrow of endings
this day we have a new love
we allow the risk of the fall again
ignore old pains past languages
press our skin against another
with fresh words never heard before
Mary Strong Jackson
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Just as her book, The Never-Ending Poem by the Poets of Everything, brings the freshest of approaches to a body of work, From Other Tongues is equally original and delightful. Mary Jackson’s language and imagination invite me into a mind well-traveled and I am an unabashed admirer. I want to thank her for writing such a book, it will be coming on and off my shelf with frequency.
Joan Logghe
Santa Fe Poet Laureate Emerita
Mary Strong Jackson’s From Other Tongues is a book of poetry that makes us reconsider the most commonplace words, by making us more aware of the concepts we can’t easily express because their nuances are not easily rendered in the English language. It’s a book for word-lovers, and philosophers who have pondered how to say, or approximate the unsayable.
Darryl Lorenzo Wellington
— poet and Writing Fellow at the Center for Community Change
Jackson writes poems that illuminate words seemingly untranslatable into English. In poems that are sometimes spare and yet enlightening, she plays with the idea that language may unite us human beings. In her poems, words and meaning are fluid and moving. They will make you wonder; they will make you smile.
Karla Huston, Wisconsin Poet Laureate 2017-18, author of A Theory of Lipstick, Main Street Rag Publications.
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give me your huddled masses, tired and poor,
from under bridges, in soup kitchens,
in shelters, sleeping in cars,
give me the billionaires building
their excess like Easter Island chiefs
big, bigger, biggest
America the beautiful
I have a dream
68 year old veteran shot in his home
by police “I’m OK. I didn’t call you. Please leave me alone”
audio recorded by his medical alert gadget
police called him nigger before they killed him
Bobby Kennedy visited Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota
his plane landed in my town closest airport to the rez
I touched his elbow over the chain link fence
Roger Mudd helped my cousin to her feet when the fence fell
Mom said dirt soft as powder
felt good under bare feet coming up between toes
congress knew of the man-made dust bowl
the deaths
but acted only after the black day
when dust blew across states
darkened the windows of the capital
as Hugh Bennett gave his plea
for the people from the plains 24
at school we crouched, hid, feared the Russians
mom said their leaders lie to their people
Mom was 11 when Guthrie strummed his machine that kills fascists
singing “This Land was Made for You and Me”
we sang it at the Assumption Academy
and sang “how many times must a white dove sail
before she can rest in the sand
yes’n how many times must the cannon balls fly
before they’re forever banned”?
just wanted a buzz bike like everyone else
Gulf of Tonkin-lie to invade Vietnam
flag-covered caskets on every night’s news
Weapons of Mass Destruction-lie to invade Iraq
no caskets on any news
Karla Faye Baker accepts Jesus into her heart
like George Bush who made June 10th “Jesus Day” in Texas
where he put Karla to death
so as to give equal rights to women
a child waves to the soldier in Iraq
a text comes across from his Dad
“Patty has five new puppies”
the soldier smiles 25
tips his combat helmet over his face
sobs
ring around the rosy, pocket full of posy
ashes to ashes we all fall down
Charlie Rose interviewed Steven Pinker
whose research says the world is less violent
masses of violent voyeurs
watch 24 hour news-entertainment
and elect Donald Trump
Mary Strong Jackson
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