I’m done watching shows where everyone is dying
And waiting to die.
I realize that is one way
to summarize the human condition,
and I’ve tried it myself,
but I’m not interested anymore
in tracing the bullet,
the slicing wires,
the broken glass,
the racing cancer,
the step off the edge.
My man reminds me
they’re not real.
But aren’t they?
In the way all the stories we tell
are some kind of real—
even the ones with minotaurs
and men with bloody palms
coming back from the dead—
someone was scared and seeking
and wanted something
to guide them home.
But these shows only give me
vague physics
and enough makeup
so the actors look tired
in a glossy kind of way.
I’d rather go to bed early,
set myself up with my snoring dog,
write my corner of the world,
let our hands go every which way
as the hours flee
over the winking horizon.
Jessica E. Pierce’s debut collection, Consider the Body, Winged, was published by First Matter Press in 2021. Winner of the 24th Annual Lois Cranston Memorial Poetry Prize from CALYX, you can find her poems in Bellingham Review, Cimarron Review, Euphony, Jet Fuel Review, JMWW, Northwest Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, @poetryisnotaluxury, Tar River Poetry, Writer Mother Monster, and elsewhere. She has been a semi-finalist and two-time finalist for the Pablo Neruda Prize from Nimrod, a finalist for the New Ohio Review’s NORward Prize, and a finalist for the MVICW Poetry Contest, for which she received a Poet Fellowship. Jessica earned her Ed.M. from Harvard and works in a large school district in Oregon to create anti-racist alternatives to exclusionary discipline.
