Olivia Jacobson
Self-Portrait, Fourth Grade
I love rust I love ruin I love cattle and cowbirds their black licorice wings I love barbed wire and brown bats and finding shotgun shells in the grass I love toads and spotted leopard frogs and picking wild raspberries with mom in the back I love birch trees that shed their long paper bark I love apple butter and burn pits and floating grey ash I love bean stalks and barn kittens I love hopping along cinderblocks washed up by the stream I love lilacs and lavender and stripping the tulip tree’s big corncob seeds I love collecting chicken feathers but I hate gathering eggs I hate sunburns and blisters and the rat snakes nesting by the pond I hate the tiller I hate tomato worms I hate spiders orb weavers and the ones that run along the water when you walk past I hate when mom tells me I don’t hate things I strongly dislike I hate the neighbor’s witchy-long hands I hate the other neighbor and his comments on my little-woman legs I hate the nighttime I hate my pink bedroom I hate how my ceiling fan wobbles when dad slams a door I hate when dad slams doors I hate dad sometimes I hate hating dad sometimes I hate who dad is sometimes I hate when I find him asleep on the toilet and he won’t go to bed sometimes
Last Night in Indianapolis
Last night, I dreamt I was in Indianapolis again,
and in the dream, Spider stumbled into my father’s shop,
blood and glass sparking from his forehead
where he’d gone through the windshield. My mother
ran to place her hand against his leaking head
for the pressure, only Spider was no longer
Spider, and his skin turned into my father’s sweat-
speckled skin. My mother was consoling,
my mother was healing,
as she always was. As she always is.
And my hands turned into hers,
and my father’s blood flickered into the pink
streamers sprouting from the handlebars
of my Tweety Bird bike, and he raised
his grease-covered hand, motioning
for me to ride away.
On Concavity
Behind the pond, between the woods and the alfalfa field where my brother and I play, my father left a busted yellow S10 truck to rot in the rain. Mice have chewed up the interior, taking the soft foam for their burrows. A mulberry’s trying to force through the rusted spot in the floor. If we’re quiet, we can hear the hornets bouncing around inside the fuel tank, where they’ve made their nest, and we take turns trying to unscrew the gas cap before we both run and squeal and fall, laughing in the grass. We take turns telling stories of the little girl who drowned in the pond behind our house, hear her footsteps break twigs in the woods or the rabid dog the neighbors put down, its foaming mouth at the edge of every shadowed clearing. We pretend that the dust clouds kicked up from the gravel in the distance are the electric extensions of their ghosts or the formation of a funnel cloud, a giant swirl distending down from the south. We run home when we’re too afraid, faces pink panic and sweat and proud for having escaped, and we are not lonely yet or troubled or bruised by the casualties of life — the simple suffering that we watch our parents try to survive.
Olivia Jacobson is an MFA candidate in poetry at Syracuse University. She is the Co-Editor-in-Chief of Salt Hill Journal. Her chapbook, On Junkyards, won the Etchings Press Book Prize for Poetry (forthcoming). Her work appears or is forthcoming in The Florida Review, Moon City Review, Shō Poetry Journal, Watershed Review, Rust & Moth, and The Shore.
Artwork: “Penny for Your Thoughts” by Daniel Lurie
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