Jackie Sherbow
We went to hear it, and it felt like we
would die soon, too, like our last show: the smell of peanuts, gas
and flame, the blown-glass animals, and real ones: hooves, slick manes,
the thing I’d feared, had always feared, had dreamed about and sang
of in my sleep had come: the very last of all the chance
I’d ever have, and it was full of salt, of songs, of you,
of me, of me. I saw I’d been a knight of errant tasks,
forgetting touch and taste and breath, my hands like probes to find
the far-off stuff, but never winning favor, magic lost
while questing, turned to oil, steam, and metal, broken down
to basest distillations, seeping back into the lake.
***
Jackie Sherbow is a writer and editor living in New York. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Okay Donkey, Moonchild Magazine, Bad Pony, Luna Luna, Day One, The Opiate, and elsewhere, and have been part of the Emotive Fruition performance series. She works as an editor for two leading mystery-fiction magazines as well as Newtown Literary, the literary journal dedicated to the borough of Queens, NY.