Poetry By Jennie Lightweis-Goff

Warren LeMay CC



Foot Sestina

 
I paid the debt
owed to desire
on a cold ferry
ride: empty
from hunger
and travelling by foot.
 
From where I sit, I foot
the bill. I paid the debt
even when I went hungry
while that man hoarded desire  --
always flush and never empty.
When he went to hell, I steered the ferry.
 
Long after, we saw each other on the ferry
debouching from the foot
of Canal. I greeted him with regret: I’d made an empty
boast some time before, told my sister that the debt
was paid, that I’d shed booze and that desire.
Addiction was the lack I took for hunger.
 
Some time ago, he fed the hunger.
Through lies and excuses and suburban sprawl, he’d ferry
from his wife’s bed to mine in the city. Desire
cracked against his heel on the way. One foot
in my door, and we tore through skin to pay the debt.
I never left any fuller than empty,
 
he says when we meet again. I recall our after, how empty
his green eyes looked when hunger
was cool but not sated. Little death, little debts –
A little dinner? I ask. The wife would ferry
through snot and razors to keep me home. She puts her foot
down on my neck these days.  As for that old desire….?
 
Never old. You look young still. That softness I desired:
your precious state I called it. I let my eyes empty
of intent. His are too full. And then I reach to pat his foot
with mine. This touch won’t feed the hunger,
or sign the old promissory note, left by the Tooth Fairy
on my guest room pillows: lie for lie, debt for debt.
 
There it is: desire. He paid for his till he’s dead of hunger:
the shoe is empty. My foot touches metal. Very
new, he says. I left a limb in the last storm. Pain struck my debts.
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​Jennie Lightweis-Goff is a lyric essayist and scholar of American Literature. She is an academic in recovery from drugs and alcohol, as well as the self-concealing jargon of the profession. She published an unwieldy embarrassing dissertation in 2011, Blood at the Root: Lynching as American Cultural Nucleus (SUNY Press). Her second book, Captive City: Meditations on Slavery in the Urban South, was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 2025, and was long-listed for the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize in 2023;  it is a labor history of slavery that argues that American cities are addicted to the undervalued labor from which they profited in the 19th century. Her personal essays have appeared in The Point, Liberties, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and on her own Substack, The Butcher's Darling. She spent the first half of her childhood in her family's small restaurant, and the second half in their tiny independent bookstore. Nonetheless, her artistic and intellectual labor was born in the back of the house.