Tag: Jackleen Holton

Three Poems by Jackleen Holton

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The Horse Returns

Woken from a dream, deep
as a black lake—
a familiar silhouette appears
in the doorway on the first
day of the new year,
my daughter, born in the horse
year, comes into our room,
afraid of the lightning
flashing in the high windows,
the whip-crack of thunder.
She crawls in between us
as she hasn’t done in years—
never has she known a storm
like this. The clock says
it’s the moment of the horse,
the eclipse that ushers in the year.
Bright fissures in the sky
illuminate the room as she burrows
in, her long, thin legs uncertain
as a foal’s, and cold against mine.
Lightning striking a person is rare,
my husband says. You have to be
the highest point for miles.
I remember my first raging
storm. I was near the same age
when I went to my mother
for the last time.
So, I lie awake, listening
to her breath as it softens,
the rain between thunderclaps
in the just-born year.

*

Challenger

The day the space shuttle exploded
over and over, its gray debris falling
like the feathers of a struck bird,
back down to earth,

I watched in one of the millions
of classrooms darkened
for the occasion,
our desks semi-circled

around a wheeled-in television
as the nation’s collective gasp
dissolved into breathless
silence, the bright

comet-stream of failure
unfurling in real-time.
And Mr. Warner,
eleventh grade English,

who had made it to the final
round of the competition
to be the teacher sent up
on that doomed flight,

slammed his fist down hard
on his desk, a guttural
cry escaping him
as he shot out of the room.

The rest of the semester,
after the explosion
of his rage—
against the government,

against incompetence
in all its myriad forms—
had been extinguished, only grief
loomed over the classroom

he mostly kept in darkness,
allowing us to do as we pleased
as he leaned back, staring up
past the ceiling.

Because what’s the point of anything
once you’ve seen the ashes
of a dream so nearly grasped
fall like a spent firecracker over the ocean?

Nineteen-eighty-six emerged again
the other day, with news of divers
pulling from the sea
a panel of that spacecraft.

While this week, another rocket
is readied for takeoff. NASA says
that soon a woman astronaut
will set foot on the moon.

I haven’t seen Mr. Warner in years,
but today at my kid’s school assembly,
on the playground on a windy
November morning,

I’m remembering him,
and for the first time in decades,
hand over my heart
like a child, I recite

the pledge, lips moving
silently as if in prayer
as I gaze up at the chalk rubbing
of a daytime moon, half-full.

*

Geometry

was simple, surprisingly,
as even the basic math classes
hadn’t been. So easy
that the thick-as-pigshit
footballers came to me for answers.
I tutored a few, enjoyed unparalleled
popularity, though most were content
with a crib sheet on their laps,
or bobbing up and down
behind me in the back of the room.
I was great at intersecting
shapes, they all praised me.
And there were moments
when it appeared, the geometry
of the sacred, clicking into place
and lighting up like a power grid
on the ceiling above us.
The rhombus, I knew instinctively
the parallelogram, the isosceles.
I remember it so clearly: that little study
room behind the library. I look into it now
as if it were an enchanted egg,
and there I am, shining
as I instruct two corn-fed boys
how to triangulate.
I got not one but several A’s that year.
But then came algebra, the numbers
nothing like the angles. I couldn’t
solve for x, didn’t know why the y
kept changing, kept jumping
around on the page,
but the worst thing was that nobody
came to me for the answers
I didn’t have anymore.

*

Jackleen Holton’s poems have been published in the anthologies “The Giant Book of Poetry”, “California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology”, and “Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life”. Honors include Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Cimarron Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, The Sun and others.

On the Ferris Wheel at the County Fair, I Remember the YouTube Video About a Woman’s Near-Death Experience by Jackleen Holton

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On the Ferris Wheel at the County Fair, I Remember the YouTube Video About a Woman’s Near-Death Experience

and wonder what it will be like, rising
from myself, husk shucked
and at last, not like her
brief rendezvous. She was lucky.
Death chose her from the throng
of writhing bodies
at the Manhattan nightclub
in her twenties, whispered
How high? as it shot her up
to heaven. I could have used that
wake-up call wrapped in a hit
of ecstasy back then,
could have learned what love
was much sooner.
But no. Let it be like this,
the world I’ve known growing
smaller beneath me, the sun
a thin orange crease
between ocean and sky,
everything aglow, and, yes, the love
that all the near-death people try
to describe, all of it shimmering
in this peach-colored light.

*

Jackleen Holton’s poems have been published in the anthologies The Giant Book of Poetry, California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology, and Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life. Honors include Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared in Dogwood, Poet Lore, Rattle, The Sun, and others.

Two Poems by Jackleen Holton

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In the Recovery Room After the Biopsy

Once, a friend told me that his mother’s
hospice agency offered an early exit
option, though they didn’t call it that,
or use the phrase assisted suicide.
I was surprised, so I wrote it down,
the name they gave it, something
transition, maybe? Peaceful
departure? No, but something to do
with travel, velocity.
Not exactly pre-boarding,
but that’s the gist of it. His mom
said no, it was too expensive,
and they’d already gone
through all her money,
so they waited, though he
had started to say he’d be happy
to pick up the tab, but stopped himself
because he was already thinking
about the curtains, how he’d replace
them with something lighter,
maybe a new coat of paint.
My mother’s already gone.
She spared us the long drawn-out adieu,
tubes and sunken eyes.
So why did I need to know the name?
Had I been stroking my cancer scar
again as he spoke, thinking
about my nine-year-old who came home
from school the other day, angry
that all her friends’ parents were thirty,
not fifty like us. I wrote down the price,
too, I’m sure of it. Twenty-five hundred?
That’s not so bad for an upgrade.
How to say it? Put me on the redeye
to L.A. I’ll be there before
I open my eyes, the flight
attendant making the rounds, leaning
in to whisper we’re here, gently
touching my arm as if to wake me.

*

Al-Anon

There’s a church down the street
where I can go when I start to feel
those little pangs of judgment
about all the ways that other people
choose to lick their wounds.
For example, my childhood friend whose liver
must scream in that high-pitched way
that neglected plants do, a friend last seen
on Facebook, perched on the rim
of a birdbath-sized margarita.
Or my husband, coughing up pieces of lung,
then sticking another goddamn
cigarette in his gob
first thing every morning.
See, I’m doing it in real time.
I need another meeting.
Because there’s something
comforting about the aroma of burnt
coffee well past my caffeine curfew,
and the little wicker basket
that goes around, only asking
for a dollar, the clichés and rhymes
we read aloud, and the ones we say
to one another absent any sense of irony,
after all it’s not a poetry reading,
no pressure to be dazzling.
And then there are the stories.
People’s kids who’ve overdosed,
terrible spouses coming home blotto,
most of the stories so much sadder
than mine, that I’d feel a little better,
if there weren’t this competing need
to fit in, or one-up that sometimes
makes me feel duty-bound
to dramatize. Like the one time
I narrated my friend into the hospital
on the liver transplant list.
And usually someone brings a box
of donuts or store-bought sugar
cookies, and if there’s a few
that nobody else has eaten, I fold
them up in a napkin, tuck it
into my purse for later.
And then there’s the end of the meeting,
the circle, holding hands with strangers,
repeating the incantation, then raising
our clasped hands up to send the spell
out into the ethers, the exodus
to the dark parking lot, buzzing
with hope, and a little more
of that coveted serenity, a firefly
light in my soul as I let go and let
my headlights float me all the way home.

*

Jackleen Holton’s poems have been published in the anthologies The Giant Book of Poetry, California Fire & Water: A Climate Crisis Anthology, and Steve Kowit: This Unspeakably Marvelous Life. Honors include Bellingham Review’s 49th Parallel Poetry Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Florida Review, Poet Lore, Rattle, Slipstream, The Sun and others.