Poetry By Jackie K. White

Davis Staedtler CC




Bookshelf Chronicle: February 2018 (A History of Wayside Songs)

The prison industrial complex explodes
releasing a casino bestiary, ash on wind,
liars, liars, liars, scratched into street 

calligraphy and the wayside song
“and there was evening, and there
was morning…” and abroad,

an ox plods on through Morocco, 
and here, reveries of a solitary biker, 
in full metal, let loose the octaves 

of another nation’s collapse into dirge: 
“Meet me behind Mars, whatever 
your moods, and bring ornaments.”

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Bookshelf Chronicle: March-April 2019 (A History of Nonbelievers)


The mirror maker has rescinded the sweet
herbaceous miracle and given up 

on the evolution of love. Let’s turn, then,
to the orison anthology and study

magical realism for non-believers
whose cry in the snow echoes lava falls.

The crude angel rides the premise of light,
sends whispers from the aural world, sends 

us on a post high-school reality quest. 
“Forget,” she says, “strange attractors. Some 

lives are changed by chance.” I believe her. 
Some stories from my grandmother’s time 

and from my mother’s offer a measure of song 
with clues for finding your way out when life 

changes plans, as it does, always, as we secretly
want it to. Despite that premise, we have only this

life of mothers and knives, a clue to how blackened
is the body of this universe, the only celestial

one we know, but, of course, now without grounding.

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Jackie K. White earned her PhD in Creative Writing (poetry) from the University of Illinois, Chicago (UIC) and was a Professor of English, now Professor Emerita, at Lewis University. She is the author of three chapbooks--Bestiary Charming, 2006 Anabiosis Press Award; Petal Tearing & Variations, Finishing Line (2008); and Come Clearing, Dancing Girl Press, 2012—and her poems and translations have appeared in Ballast, BlazeVOX, Hobart, The Los Angeles Review, New Plains, among others. Her chapbook of collaborative poems, with Simone Muench, Hex & Howl (2021) and their full-length collection The Under Hum (2024) were published by Black Lawrence Press. Jackie has also served as an editor for RHINO and is now a consultant for Jet Fuel Review. A native of Illinois, she currently resides in Colorado.