Jessica Goodfellow

Subsistence

Under the knife
the lotus root
falls in slices
that look like
many-eyed
skulls.
 
The null
hypothesis,
the one to be
disproved,
dissolves
in a mangle
of hunger.
 
We eat
what grows
in mud
not to be/
come mud,
not to be/
 
come the skull,
many-eyed
and watching,
always watching.

---

Things Found in a Backyard Swimming Pool

The fuchsia tutus
of tiny ballerinas
fallen from
the mimosa tree.
 
The shiny
silver coins
of drowned
baby mice.
 
Twinned sea-
horses in the brains
of local children,
swimming in time
like in glass.
 
Seafoam
green ghosts
of clam shells,
and starfish,
and one bare-
nippled mermaid
insisting her way
through layers
of whitewash
on the walls
of the once
palely tattooed pool.
Then, quick as
a chlorine blink,
the watery visions
vanish.
 
In the dining room
the quirky former owner’s
other marooned mural—    
faraway boats
afloat
on the Sea of Crete
as glimpsed through
Doric columns—    
is also covered over
by layers
and layers
of suburban paint.
 
Still, when the light
shines at a particular
angle the seascape
flickers
on the wall
like a scene
from an old black
and white movie
just before the film
in the projector snaps
                             (kaCHAK kaCHAK).
 
Guests, sometimes,
push their chairs back
from the table,
shaking their heads
and muttering, until
the buried mural
is explained.
 
But the children
whose better part
of the day’s
been spent underwater
are unsurprised
when a thing is one
moment within reach
and the next moment
gone.
 
Like a near-
by
heart-
beat
thudding
through the waters,
almost unnoticed,
having always
been there,
                             (à deux, adieu)
until the children
rupture the pool’s
surface and emerge,
slicked and blinking,
into the bright and
separate world.




--
Jessica Goodfellow’s books are Whiteout (University of Alaska Press, 2017), Mendeleev’s Mandala (2015) and The Insomniac’s Weather Report (2014). She’s had work in Best New Poets, The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and Motionpoems. In 2016 she was a writer-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve.